Smartphone application for structural health monitoring

Abstract

In recent years, smartphone technologies have developed rapidly. They are increasingly taking on the role of laptops and compact personal computers, as well as digital cameras, through which measurements can be taken in various industries including the building industry. This ability to receive, process and transmit measurement data makes them a tool allowing civil engineers to inspect the operational condition of building structures and their constituent parts (so-called “Structural Health Monitoring”). In this paper, a contemporary review of publications related to the use of the smartphone as a measuring tool in structural health monitoring is made. It is seen as an opportunity to develop a “real-time” smartphone application, to measure and visualize fields of displacement and deformation of structural elements. This possibility is based on digital image correlation analysis. The working principles of the smartphone application using the smartphone camera are described and the capabilities of the smartphone application, developed by the authors, for the measurement of two-dimensional fields of displacement and deformation are illustrated.