Quantifying Environmental Noise impact on Heart Rate Variability Faiza Guerrache Computing and Technology, Nottingham Trent University 1 N0045291@my.ntu.ac.uk Eman M.G.Younis 1, 2 Faculty of Computers & Information, Minia University, Egypt 2 eman.younis@ntu.ac.uk eman.younas@mu.edu.eg Eiman Kanjo Computing and Technology, Nottingham Trent University 1 eiman.kanjo@ntu.ac.uk ABSTRACT The environmental factors in outdoor spaces can have a great influence on how people feel and behave. In this paper, we propose a new method to quantify the environmental noise impact on health and behavior in real-world settings. This is achieved by monitoring physiological signals such as heart rate variability in response to environmental noise. By employing wearable sensors and smart phones, we will be able to quantify and study both environmental noise levels and physiological data simultaneously. The heart rate data can be analyzed and visualized using Heart Rate Variability (HRV) responses to independent variables in real time. As a result, we can establish a better understanding of the inter-relations between human health (in particular heart rate) and personal exposure to environmental pollutants. CCS Concepts • Applied computing~Consumer health • Human-centered computing~Smartphones • Computing methodologies~Classification and regression trees Keywords Heart and noise; environmental monitoring; heart rate variability; environmental noise; physiological signals. INTRODUCTION Noise can be defined as undesirable and annoying sounds. Noise pollution can be generated by many sources in our daily life. It can be from household devices, cars on the roads, aircrafts in airports and even social events and celebrations. Noise is not only irritating and disturbing, but also, is now considered a serious health problem. There have been multiple research efforts on studying the effects of noise on people’s health [4, 5, 6, 8, and 9]. The effects of noise on the human body are extensive, ranging from hear loss, tinnitus, heart disease, stroke, anxiety, stress, sleep disorders, depression, learning difficulties, job performance, to reduced cognitive abilities [1]. Many external factors affect the body physiologically in response to changes in surrounding environment. The development of the wearable sensors has made it possible to collect environmental data and integrate it with physiological body data to quantify the humans’ well-being (Quality of Life) in real-time. This technological advancement enables us to detect physiological and cardiovascular responses, associated with the environmental context and understand their inter-relationships. Previous research addressed the noise exposure effect on health in general. Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, there is no studies investigating the use of smart sensors to quantify the cause and effect relationship between heart variability and environmental noise. In this paper, we present an initial experiment and early result around Nottingham City Center showing a clear relationship between noise and heart variability. This provides us with a set of objective measures in relation to human wellbeing. We can then understand and correlate these measures with other environmental factors in specific setting, e.g. traffic noise, busy shopping environments and many more (the concept of the Exposome) Related Research Previous research has overlooked the quantification of the relation between noise and heart rate in real-time, hence to understand the ways which people feel, and biologically react to environmental noise; monitoring the physiological state and surrounding noise in the environment should be studied. Heart rate variability methods are well-established and widely used methods in medical research [3]. We believe that using them in monitoring the human body reactions to noise, will give new insights on health and noise relationships. Tzaneva, et al. [4], investigated the use of HRV statistical methods such as mean and standard deviation to measure the impact of human exposure to higher noise level. This study claimed that there is an increase of the sympathetic activity after exposure to high levels of noise. Radadi and Rehimi, [5] studied the impact of noise on humans by developing numerical tools for the estimation of noise levels generated by the flow of traffic and to map sound noise in order to reduce its impact on people’s quality of life and the environment. Whereas, Taylor et al. [6] presented a method to use wearable physiological sensors to dynamically detect participant response to increased system delays. Sharma [8] concluded that persons’ exposure to a noisy environment for long times may cause a tinnitus in ears. Siskova and Juricka [9] conducted a survey to study the effect of noise on workers’ performance in a plastic manufacturing company. The study showed that high noise levels have a negative impact on job performance, where between 30 to 50 % of those who have been surveyed believed that different noise sources in the work area are “very troubling” and “disturbing “and the most annoying sounds were from machines. 75% of respondents stated that if the workplace was better adjusted, their performance would be much higher. Many other research projects [6, 7, 10, 11,12] have used mobile sensing and crowd sourcing to create noise maps around various areas of a city, to show the effect of noise on humans. MobiCASE 2016, November 30-December 01, Cambridge, Great Britain Copyright © 2016 EAI DOI 10.4108/eai.30-11-2016.2267063