The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is mandated with conducting scientific research on the health and safety issues in the workplace environment and provide the necessary guidance to prevent illnesses and injuries. This research paper focused on accessing the accuracy of the smartphone sound measurement applications available on the iOS and Android platforms. These applications (apps) were assessed to determine whether they can be appropriately used for noise measurement in the workplace. The study acquired a representative sample from the population of popular tablets and smartphones available in the market (Kardous & Shaw, 2014). The tablets and smartphones were selected on the basis of their occupational relevancy and applications that allowed manual and digital input of files that could be used for calibration adjustment. The study evaluated 192 apps; 130 iOS applications and 62 Android applications. Of these, only 10 iOS and 4 Android apps met the selection criteria.
The results of the study indicated two apps had mean differences of +-2dB of the reference measurements. These apps were considered to being in good agreement with the A-weighted and unweighted measurements. Other two applications had a difference of -0.52dB (A-weighted) and 0.07 dB (unweighted) from the reference values. These results suggest that some of the applications available on the market can be considered reliable and accurate can be used to assess the occupational noise exposures. The recent development of crowdsourcing techniques provides opportunities for noise measurement techniques to improve the awareness of the workplace safety and noise management aiding in advancing the health of the employees (Kardous & Shaw, 2014). This study, however, does not provide comprehensive results of the mobile sound measurement techniques available in the market since the applications are updated on a regular basis and future researchers could consider conducting experiments in an uncontrolled environment and sample a large number of devices.
Reference
Kardous, C. & Shaw, P. (2014). Evaluation of smartphone sound measurement applications. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 135 (4), 1-7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4865269
