Dynamic Sound Level Control In Educational Buildings
ICT & Open Learning/Innovation
Client company:Fontys
Patrick Kocken
Rens van den Brekel
Project description
For their educational buildings, Fontys is looking for a solution to control the sound levels in parts of the building without compromising the dynamics of the buildings. Earlier other groups have already worked on this problem and have created parts of the solution. In this project we answer the following research question: "How do you enable a building manager of an educational building to designate quiet zones simply and dynamically and how do you point this out to students and intervene if too much noise is made?"
Context
Modern, dynamic educational buildings often face the challenge that they are a great environment for one student and not at all for another. An important reason for this is the sound. It is an enormous challenge to ensure that the noise levels in these buildings are acceptable to as many people as possible without compromising the dynamics of the buildings.
Results
For the project we created a fully fledged system to dynamically control sound levels in educational buildings. This system contains a web app created with React, an enterprise microservices architecture written in Go, an application that can mock the hardware and a prototype of the hardware. During the sprints we had multiple interviews with the stakeholders and possible users including building managers to validate our system. In the spring semester of 2023 an internal workgroup of Fontys will create a test setup with our system at TQ5 to further explore the possibilities of the project. Since we didn’t have any technology students we didn't have the resources to fully focus on both the software and the hardware. Together with the stakeholders we came to an agreement that in the future a technology group should focus solely on the hardware. This meant that we also had to create and normalise a rugged interface for communication between the hardware and the backend and properly document our project for the handover.
Download Dynamic Sound File (image)
Download TICT Dynamic Sound Level Control (PDF)
About the project group
The group consists of 2 students, both with a Software Engineering profile. We have worked on this project 4 days a week since September 2022. During this project we have had multiple sprints with a retrospective for each sprint and one or more demo moments. Both group members have known each other for more than 6 years and are really well integrated with each other.
