Low power DSP with wireless monitoring for civil constructions

© The authors and ICE Publishing: All rights reserved, 2016. Noise arising from the construction industry is a major source of noise pollution. Noise from construction sites affects not only the site itself, but also the surrounding area including neighbouring businesses and residents. The duration, complexity, schedule, location, method of construction and type of projects greatly affect the extent of noise impact. Although there are many noise regulation frameworks such as BS 5228, BS 7580 in the UK and 2002/49/EC across Europe to control and mitigate the impact of this construction noise, there is no standardized criteria for assessing construction noise impact. Hence there is a need to identify the extent and magnitude of the noise through using noise monitoring equipment. Such equipment should identify noise, quantify noise sources and differentiate various noise types such as piling, demolition, and hammering, reversing truck warning signals. The system should also provide a noise map of the locality and the surrounding area. This paper describes the development of a custom wireless sensor board for noise identification, monitoring and localisation using a low-power DSP and microcontroller. The system stores noise samples to a local SD memory card for future analysis and wirelessly transmits a summary of significant noise events in real time. This paper describes the result of an initial test of the system on a construction site in Cambridge. The noise event and their efficiency has been compared with high resolution, beamforming technology based SeeSV-S205 audio camera. Future work on the system will include further testing to develop better noise discrimination algorithms.