Performance evaluation of smartphone-based vibration meter application software

Abstract

Modern smartphones have been equipped with MEMS sensors allowing them to be used for advanced purposes. A MEMS accelerometer is embedded in the smartphone to sense motion and vibration. Recently, many smartphone-based vibration-meter applications software employed the embedded accelerometer and used them for vibration monitoring and field measurement. However, the accuracy of this kind of vibration meter has not known yet. In this paper, we discuss about the evaluation of smartphone-based vibration meter using the standard method for vibration meter calibration described in the ISO 16063-21. A vibration measurement by the smartphone-based vibration meter is compared to the reading of the reference accelerometer type B&K 8305. The evaluation was conducted in a frequency range of 10 Hz to 50 Hz with the amplitude of 0.1 G to 1 G. This study showed that the accuracy of the smartphone-based vibration meter is decreased in the higher frequency range.