Review on smartphone sensing technology for structural health monitoring

Abstract

Sensing is a critical and inevitable sector of structural health monitoring (SHM). Recently, smartphone sensing technology has become an emerging, affordable, and effective system for SHM and other engineering fields. This is because a modern smartphone is equipped with various built-in sensors and technologies, especially a triaxial accelerometer, gyroscope, global positioning system, high-resolution cameras, and wireless data communications under the internet-of-things paradigm, which are suitable for vibration- and vision-based SHM applications. This article presents a state-of-the-art review on recent research progress of smartphone-based SHM. Although there are some short reviews on this topic, the major contribution of this article is to exclusively present a comprehensive survey of recent practices of smartphone sensors to health monitoring of civil structures from the perspectives of measurement techniques, third-party apps developed in Android and iOS, and various application domains. Findings of this article provide thorough understanding of the main ideas and recent SHM studies on smartphone sensing technology.