Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation

Drs. Nithya Ramanathan and Scott Fruin will collaborate to develop cell phone technology to accurately capture and measure noise levels. This collaboration addresses the problem of environmental noise as an underappreciated hazard. Environmental noise has been linked to heart disease, stroke, and heart attacks. However, nearly all associated health studies have been conducted using only estimates of noise exposure from either outdoor measurements, computer modeling, or self-reporting. None of these are particularly accurate means of estimating true noise exposure, especially since a greater proportion of most people's time is spent indoors. With the proposed technology, there is potential to make true noise exposure measurements with large numbers of subjects using cell phone technology.  Scott Fruin has extensive experience in measuring air pollution in both mobile settings and on foot. He will direct the validation in the laboratory and in the field. Nithya Ramanathan, currently a post-doc at UCLA's Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (and founder of Lorax Analytics), will write the mobile phone and back-end server software.