Development of long-term data acquisition system of noise exposure and personal behavior for analysis of health risk: Research background

Since people living in urban areas are continuously exposed to loud environmental noises for a long duration, the noise has to be treated not only as nuisance in our daily lives and adverse psychological effect but also as possible risk on health. WHO has presented an environmental noise guideline and has suggested dangers or risks on health by long-term high noise exposure, and has recently published nighttime noise guideline to prevent adverse health effect to sleep disturbance. Some research projects in EU have revealed that detailed measurement in time of individual noise exposure is needed to improve the current assessment method, instead of those based on energy-averaged value over the exposed duration to noise. It suggests necessity of short time-interval measurement of individual noise exposure as well as information when and where people are exposed to the noise. It is also necessary to measure environmental condition in nightitme, since the condition very likely disturbs our sleep and therefore gives some effects to our health. From these circumstances and relating issues in Japanese, we have established a new research project which aims to investigate the effect of individual noise exposure on health. This report presents the research background and objectives.