Matching Technological & Societal Innovations: The Social Design of a Mobile Collaborative App for Urban Noise Monitoring

Mobile Phone Sensing offers a great opportunity toward the large scale monitoring of urban phenomena, such as the exposure of the population to environmental noise. Our research aims to make available a supporting mobile application together with the associated platform for the analysis of the contributed observations. The technological issues arising have been partly solved but a gap remains between the need for the massive collection of relevant data, and the quantity and accuracy of the measurements that are actually gathered. This paper presents our iterative research process to tackle this challenge, which combines technological innovation and social design. The presented research results contribute to a better understanding of why and how people use mobile phone sensing applications; the results also inform how to best leverage mobile crowd-sensing in the development of smart cities and how it may serve addressing urban challenges related to, e.g., public health or urban planning.