Barcelona, MWC – According to the World Health Organization, noise pollution is the second most significant threat to health in urban areas. In response, European legislation has been developed to reduce noise pollution, but this method of determination is far from the actual perception of noise by residents, leading to time-consuming enforcement and inadequate insight for policymakers. To address this issue, Munisense is proud to introduce its noise monitoring stations and services, which provide deep insight into sources of noise through scalable sound monitoring networks that localize and identify each sound source using AI/ML.

The Munisense noise monitoring stations and services are suitable for a range of noise sources, including industrial noise, traffic noise (road, rail, air), construction noise, wind turbine noise, music events, sports noise, and nightlife disturbance, etc..

Automatic analysis and conversion of the data to meaningful real-time and historical information fills the online dashboards, providing actionable insights. The nuisance can trigger external systems, like lighting, external displays, and video cameras via open data APIs. Municipalities, businesses, and residents have continuous and historical insight into sound exposure, sound quality, noise pollution, and detected sound events in their environment, resulting in a range of benefits:

• Quickly resolving residential noise complaints at low labor cost

• Improving enforcement at over 40% lower cost

• Creating awareness of noise pollution and enabling self-regulation

• Providing high-quality feedback on the effectiveness of policy measures

• Providing understandable insight for residents into the quality of their sound environment and empowering them to participate in discussions with local government on improvements in their living environment

• Facilitating faster and more cost-effective investigations by consulting firms due to the permanent availability of measurement data

• Stimulating innovation through availability of high-quality noise event data via open data interfaces

"It's no surprise that the largest cities in the Netherlands and Belgium, as well as numerous consultancy firms and businesses, are using the Munisense noise monitoring services. Thus gaining control over noise pollution and improving the quality of the living environment, in collaboration with their residents," said a representative from Munisense.

Munisense's sound monitoring network offers the lowest cost of ownership of permanent monitoring infrastructure (ZHAGA) and integrates privacy protection (ISO 27001). The system provides real-time control over noise pollution and provides open API’s to integrate noise events into smart city solutions.

We look forward to meet you this week at our booth in Barcelona during MWC-4YFN - Hall 8.1 D23.4

Dutch telecom operators will phase out their 2G/GPRS networks over the next 3 years.

Vodafone and KPN have planned to be the last to switch off their 2G networks on 31-12-2025. Of course we write this with some reservations because the Dutch government will also express its opinion on this and possibly make changes. In other countries, this moment lies further ahead in the future, on 31-12-2030.

However, the 2G coverage for our LV4 and LV5 water meters will decrease somewhat in The Netherlands because T-Mobile will pull the plug on their network in mid-2023.

We now have an excellent successor: the LV8. This works with LTE-M and roaming SIMS from Deutsche Telekom. This future-proof solution can last 25 years.

What now with LV4 and LV5?

No worries! Because our digital service will continue to exist for all working LV4 or LV5 water meters, as long as they will have sufficient 2G coverage.

However, the LV4s are no longer repaired but recycled since the beginning of this year.

We will continue to repair the LV5s for you, until January 1st, 2026.

Furthermore, the batteries for both LV4 and LV5 water meters will remain available until the end of 2025.

Please contact us if you have any questions regarding this.

Switch to LTE-M

To ensure a smooth transition to the LV8 (with 4G/5G LTE-M), during 2023 a discount will be appliccable on the purchase of the future-proof LV8 when replacing LV4 water meters with serial numbers MSLV4h or MSLV4i or all LV5 water meters.

Contact us at sales@munisense.com. We are happy to advise you on the smartest (and cheapest) way to switch.

The Smart City Data platform beats submissions from many world cities at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona.
This initiative by the Belgian cities Leuven, Bruges and Roeselaere won first prize in the Enabling Technologies category!

Today, this smart platform, to which we were allowed to contribute our share of noise measurements, already solves real problems!

The continuous information about noise nuisance in Leuven is immediately converted into actions against noise nuisance. For example, the lighting is immediately adjusted automatically in the event of noise pollution, to create more peace on the street. And this is how this smart technology helps the people of Leuven to get a better night's sleep.

News item from Stad Leuven: Stad Leuven

Several Belgian media picked up this milestone, like

Het Nieuwsblad

Het Laatste Nieuws

With the award of funding within the National MIT R&D AI, the development of the dynamic sound card will get a boost. Together with our consortium partners Peutz and Embedded Acoustics, we will focus us on the development of dynamic sound cards in the built environment over the next two years.

Improving the living environment by reducing noise nuisance is an important challenge of our time. The current Dutch noise policy, however, focuses on annual calculated average noise levels. These calculations provide insufficient insight into the actual noise levels that occur, as these can vary greatly in time, space and type of activity. As a result, the effectiveness of policy choices remain unclear for a long time and the corroboration of citizens decreases. While involvement of citizens is one of the essential pillars in the new 2023 environmental law. Residents must be provided with the correct and up-to-date noise levels in their living environment. And the average noise level calculated annually does not do justice to their reality.

The Netherlands also faces a major challenge in area design and construction. This concerns both residential construction and infrastructural and industrial construction work. Construction activities often take place in densely populated areas. And so the prevention of noise nuisance is an important task.

The development of the dynamic noise map, a product that provides real-time insight into historical and current noise exposure with a high resolution in time and space, is essential for this. This provides detailed insight into the causes of noise-affected environments and the nuisance caused. And local (policy) measures can be taken to improve situations.

Our noise monitoring stations (we call them that because they can do more than measure noise) are able to support the dynamic sound card. With these noise monitoring stations we collect and process different types and large amounts of sensor data. This can be used for groundbreaking innovations.

We focus on so-called sound events, which are provided with a “timestamp”. This consists of location, direction, type and level of the noise, and is linked directly to the recording as associated data.

We are happy to keep you informed on this innovative project!