Noisemap: multi-tier incentive mechanisms for participative urban sensing

Noise pollution is a problem increasingly acknowledged by authorities and governments around the globe. At last year's PhoneSense we presented Noisemap, a participating sensing application to accurately measure noise pollution. Noisemap incorporated frequency calibration to overcome the limited microphone hardware. The challenge remaining is how to motivate smartphone users to sacrifice their time and battery on measuring noise. A user study was conducted with 49 users divided into three groups. As expected the average measurements taken per user increased from 402 to 3,357 as the number of incentive schemes increased. Over the course of 7 weeks the users captured more than 85, 000 measurements, measuring for more than six hours on average.