Crowd-sensing our Smart Cities: a Platform for Noise Monitoring and Acoustic Urban Planning

Environmental pollution and the corresponding control measurements put in place to tackle it play a significant role in determining the actual quality of life in modern cities. Amongst the several pollutant that have to be faced on a daily basis, urban noise represent one of the most widely known for its already ascertained health-related issues. However, no systematic noise management and control activities are performed in the majority of European cities due to a series of limiting factors (e.g., expensive monitoring equipment, few available technician, scarce awareness of the problem in city managers). The recent advances in the Smart City model, which is being progressively adopted in many cities, nowadays offer multiple possibilities to improve the effectiveness in this area. The Mobile Crowd Sensing paradigm allows collecting data streams from smartphone built-in sensors on large geographical scales at no cost and without involving expert data captors, provided that an adequate IT infrastructure has been implemented to manage properly the gathered measurements. In this paper, we present an improved version of a MCS-based platform, named City Soundscape, which allows exploiting any Android-based device as a portable acoustic monitoring station and that offers city managers an effective and straightforward tool for planning Noise Reduction Interventions (NRIs) within their cities. The platform also now offers a new logical microservices architecture

A Context-Aware Smart Infrastructure based on RFID Sensor-Tags and its Application to the Health-Care Domain

The implementation of easy to use, cost-effective, efficient and reconfigurable smart systems, able to collect context data and to take decisions accordingly, must be performed taking into account both hardware and software technologies. In this work, both sides are attacked. First of all, a substantial improvement on passive UHF-RFID technology is shown by proposing new RFID tags having the capability to transmit data measured by generic sensors. This novel and inexpensive device is the data source of a pervasive, context-aware system, organized according to a general purpose architecture. A challenging application of the overall system in the home-care scenario is presented, and the whole system tested: implemented hardware and software functionalities have been validated, showing the effectiveness of both technologies