The Feasibility of Using Smart Devices for Quantifying Seismic Damage to Buildings

Accelerometers in smart devices have been used to measure seismic activity by researchers. Taking smart devices to the next step and using them to characterize building seismic damage in a quantitative manner is a complex undertaking with multiple challenging dimensions. Among the top challenges are: (1) how can accelerometer data be used to obtain an accurate measure of inter-story drift, and (2) can smart devices determine if their data is meaningful before feeding it to a centralized processing station based on which electronic safety tagging can be achieved? This paper will highlight these and other challenges and describe ongoing research to address them. An analytical error model for MEMS-based accelerometers that are ubiquitous in smart devices is adopted in an attempt to understand the errors that could potentially contaminate their measurements. In addition, research is presented on how a smart device can decide if its motion is representative of the motion of the floor underneath or whether it is tainted by excessive sliding action. Computational simulation results are used to demonstrate the concepts discussed in this paper.