SiteHive’s innovative ground-borne noise monitoring

Accurate, affordable and unintrusive – a new way to manage ground-borne noise.

Until now, accurately measuring ground-borne noise has been complex, intrusive, and expensive. SiteHive’s innovation completely changes that.

SiteHive Hexanode Vibration devices now provide a cost-effective, non-invasive and much easier way to see and manage the impact of ground-borne noise. They help contractors, consultants, and regulators protect community amenity, maintain compliance, and streamline project delivery.

What is ground-borne noise?

Ground-borne noise occurs when vibrations from construction or tunnelling activities travel through the ground and radiate into nearby buildings. It provides unique challenges for contractors and consultants as it has traditionally been difficult and intrusive to measure, while at the same time it can have significant negative impacts for communities.

Key challenges include:

• Often louder than airborne noise, especially at night.
• Can disrupt residents and trigger community complaints.
• Requires compliance with ground-borne noise limits (e.g., NSW Interim Construction Noise Guideline).
• Traditionally measured with intrusive in-home microphones and expert analysis.

Why is it important to manage ground-borne noise impacts?

Australia is in the midst of an unprecedented wave of tunnelling and underground construction. The low-frequency sounds this emits travel through the ground and into buildings, often impacting residents and communities. Ground-borne noise is usually felt more than heard, and is frequently behind some of the most challenging community noise complaints.

Managing ground-borne noise has never been more important for protecting community amenity and meeting compliance requirements.

How SiteHive monitors ground-borne noise

Traditionally, monitoring ground-borne noise has been intrusive and expensive. It generally required monitoring using microphones at the site of complaints – often within people’s homes – during anti-social night hours. SiteHive has revolutionised this with an innovative new approach that uses vibration data to measure ground-borne noise.

SiteHive Hexanode Vibration devices measure vibration data continuously in real-time; SiteHive Enviro Pro software then uses this to estimate ground-borne noise in decibels (LAeq). This provides a real-time picture of ground-borne noise without entering homes.

The SiteHive approach provides many benefits over traditional methods including:

• Unintrusive – no in-home microphones required.
• Real-time and scalable, making it easy to monitor multiple locations at once.
• Easy to interpret – visual dashboards show ground-borne noise alongside PPV and VDV vibration metrics.
• Validated – the solution has been field-tested on major tunnelling projects with accuracy within 1dB.
• Regulatory aligned – designed in line with State policies and international guidelines.

Measuring ground-borne noise through vibration is a methodology that has been validated and refined over many years, but until now has never been implemented in a commercial device. The innovative SiteHive Hexanode Vibration provides accurate, real-time ground-borne noise monitoring that is simple, scalable, and unintrusive.

Key features of SiteHive’s ground-borne noise monitoring

• SiteHive Hexanode Vibration devices measure ground-borne noise – they are the first commercial monitoring devices to measure ground-borne noise alongside structural and human comfort measurements. This provides all three core vibration measurements in one compact and easy to use device.
• See ground-borne noise on the SiteHive Enviro Dashboard – ground-borne noise measurements are displayed simply in decibels as noise LAeq, which means results are easily interpretable and can be assessed against environmental management criteria, even by non-experts, without any complex data manipulation.

• Easy reporting – ground-borne noise data is integrated into configurable PDF reports that can be printed with one click, and available as CSV exports.
• Configurable ground-borne noise scaling factor – the configurable scaling factor allows verification of the translation from measured vibration to estimated ground-borne noise based on the characteristics of each unique receiving space. This means that contractors, consultants and stakeholders can be confident that remote, real-time ground-borne noise measurements are accurate at all monitoring points.
• Rapid deployment – the SiteHive Hexanode Vibration device is small, easy to deploy and scalable for short-term or long-term projects.

This makes real-time, multi-location ground-borne noise monitoring affordable, actionable, and accessible for contractors and consultants.

Key benefits of SiteHive ground-borne noise monitoring

With SiteHive you are able to:

• Investigate issues easily – community complaints can be investigated unobtrusively and immediately.
• Ensure regulatory compliance – meet State noise guidelines and monitor in line with international standards.
• Simplify reporting – dashboards, PDFs, and CSV output make ground-borne noise easy to see, understand and report on for stakeholders and regulators.
• Scalable and practical – easy and cost-effective to deploy across multiple locations.
• Protect community amenity – by identifying ground-borne noise immediately, consultants and contractors are able to reduce disturbance for residents and reduce complaints.

Where is ground-borne noise monitoring useful?

SiteHive ground-borne noise monitoring is ideal for:

Who benefits from using ground-borne noise monitoring?

SiteHive ground-borne noise monitoring is great for:

• Contractors: It’s a practical, scalable tool for compliance and community management on infrastructure, tunnelling and other complex projects.
• Consultants: It provides non-intrusive, reliable data and visualisation of ground-borne noise that’s fully validated against direct methods.
• Regulators & stakeholders: It provides trustworthy, transparent reporting aligned with guidelines, and enables noise complaints to be investigated cost-effectively without intrusive monitoring for affected residents and communities.

Summary

SiteHive’s innovative ground-borne noise monitoring provides many advantages over traditional methods, including:

• Immediate and easy-to-understand visualisation of low-frequency noise impacts.
• Real-time insights to enable proactive management of ground-borne noise
• More cost-effective and practical alternative to traditional ground-borne noise measurement.
• Unintrusive, privacy-conscious monitoring for residents
• Transparent, trustworthy reporting aligned with guidelines
• Easy, scalable deployment
• All core vibration impacts (structural, human comfort and ground-borne noise) measured in one small device.