Can your crowdsourced smartphone evaluate the structural integrity of bridges?

Amazing stuff! There is almost nothing your smartphone can not do? Endless possibilities! (just kidding)

"... A new study involving MIT researchers shows that mobile phones placed in vehicles, equipped with special software, can collect useful structural integrity data while crossing bridges. In so doing, they could become a less expensive alternative to sets of sensors attached to bridges themselves.

“The core finding is that information about structural health of bridges can be extracted from smartphone-collected accelerometer data,” ...
In the case of the Golden Gate Bridge, the researchers drove over the bridge 102 times with their devices running, and the team used 72 trips by Uber drivers with activated phones as well. The team then compared the resulting data to that from a group of 240 sensors that had been placed on the Golden Gate Bridge for three months. ..."

From the abstract:

"Monitoring and managing the structural health of bridges requires expensive specialized sensor networks. In the past decade, researchers predicted that cheap ubiquitous mobile sensors would revolutionize infrastructure maintenance; yet extracting useful information in the field with sufficient precision remains challenging. Herein we report the accurate determination of critical physical properties, modal frequencies, of two real bridges from everyday vehicle trip data. We collected smartphone data from controlled field experiments and uncontrolled Uber rides on a long-span suspension bridge in the USA (The Golden Gate Bridge) and developed an analytical method to accurately recover modal properties. We also successfully applied the method to partially-controlled crowdsourced data collected on a short-span highway bridge in Italy. Further analysis projected that the inclusion of crowdsourced data in a maintenance plan for a new bridge could add over fourteen years of service (30% increase) without additional costs. Our results suggest that massive and inexpensive datasets collected by smartphones could play a role in monitoring the health of existing transportation infrastructure."

Can your phone tell if a bridge is in good shape? | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology A new study suggests mobile data collected while traveling over bridges could help evaluate their integrity.

Crowdsourcing bridge dynamic monitoring with smartphone vehicle trips (open access)

Fig. 1: Illustration of controlled data collection and the spatial segmentation approach