Design and initial validation of external sensors board of smart phones for mobile structural health monitoring system

Internet of Things(IoT) is an important research direction in today's world, but some new challenges, i. e. large data management, field device applications, and so on, are presented. As the current hot issues in the engineering area, Structural health monitoring (SHM) is also facing new questions about design ideas in the IoT environment. Meanwhile, smart phones, which are important devices of IoT, play an important role in people's lives. This paper introduces a kind of new idea for Structural Health Monitoring using Smart Phones Technique. Smart phone, with embedded responding SHM software and inner sensors or external sensors board, may be used not only as a single wireless sensor node but also as a Mini-SHM system. The system is described in detail, and then the swing test, tension test and external sensor board test based on iPhone are done to validate the proposed system. The experimental results show that Mobile-SHM using Smart phone is feasible. The research is preliminary and more tests need to be carried out before it can be of practical use. The realization of mobile SHM system using smart phone can be considered as a milestone in making structural health monitoring popular in the life of people.