Effectiveness of Smartphone Accelerometers for Inspection

Abstract

Accelerometers are often used for inspection. With the rise of cheap accelerometers and their extensive use in smartphones there are opportunities to utilise such sensors for inspection and monitoring of our built infrastructure. However, there is often a debate around the effectiveness and accuracy of the cheaper smartphone accelerometers as compared to the more sophisticated ones. Additionally, this is also related to the question of whether several lower fidelity sensors can be better than a small number of higher fidelity sensors. To address some of these questions, this paper carries out several tests with smartphone accelerometers and statistically compares their performances. These comparisons add to the growing benchmarks of performance of lower fidelity sensors and also provides guidelines on how such sensors can be useful for a variety of applications, including their reasonable boundaries of operations. The results also provide a way of fair comparison of performances of different sensors, along with interpretation of such errors, paving way for guidelines and recommendations of their implementation in different circumstances and demands.