Is your exposure to noise too high on certain days? How is air pollution in your street? Will air quality improve in the next hours? Do you want to measure the noise pollution on the way between your home and your office? What pollution levels are considered harmful for your health? Ambiciti provides answers to these questions and many others.
*Noise pollution*
Ambiciti (previously called SoundCity) measures the actual noise levels to which you are exposed. Ambiciti can monitor noise levels throughout the day and inform you about your instantaneous, hourly and daily exposures. If you want to contribute to the improvement of the noise map in your city, you can anonymously send your measurements.
*Air pollution*
Ambiciti computes the air quality index in your region or at the exact location where you stand. You can also access to forecasts and find information about the main pollutants. Depending on your location, you may have access to hourly air quality maps, at street resolution, in real time and for the next two days. Currently, only Paris (France) enjoys such fine maps, but other cities are on the way to be included.
*Features*
Ambiciti is easy to use, but includes a lot of features:
- Measuring noise level, anytime on demand or automatically during the day;
- Air quality indexes, in the past, present and future hours or days;
- Pollution levels for nitrogen dioxide, fine particulate matter and ozone;
- Statistics on exposure to pollutions, hourly, daily, during daytime and nighttime;
- Maps with your noise measurements;
- Hourly air quality maps, at street resolution in Paris, and soon in other cities;
- Intensive measurement of noise in order to analyze a given journey or to map your neighborhood, alone or with a group of users;
- Calibration of your smartphone for noise monitoring, automatically with Ambiciti database or manually with a sound level meter;
- And other features to discover in the app!
*Permissions*
Since transparency and privacy are very important to us, we list below the permissions that the app will ask for, and how we use them. They are essentially related to noise measurement.
Note that actual sound samples are never stored on the phone or uploaded to our servers. Only the amplitude of the sound in dB(A) is calculated, and uploaded with your permission. An anonymous identifier is created for each device for distinguishing between the data sent by different users, but no identifying information is collected.
Microphone(s): required for the measurement of noise.
Location: linking a noise value to a location helps in collaboratively creating a "noise map" of the city, and also allows you to see your acoustic environment on a map.
Local Storage: the noise readings can be exported to a file on your device
Others: access to network and enabling tasks to execute in background allows the app to upload the sensed data if you enable it.
DISCLAIMER
Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.