Biomechanically influenced mobile and participatory pedestrian data for bridge monitoring

Future structural health monitoring systems are evolving toward crowdsourced, autonomous, sustainable forms based on which damage-indicative structural features can be identified. Unlike conventional sensor systems, they serve as non-stationary, mobile, and distributed sensor network components. For example, smartphone sensors carried by pedestrians decouple from the structure of interest, making it difficult to measure structural vibration. Taking bridges as instances, smartphone sensor data contain not only the bridge vibration but also the pedestrians’ biomechanical features. In this article, pedestrians’ smartphone data are used to conduct force estimation and modal identification for structural health monitoring purposes. Two major pedestrian activities, walking and standing, are adopted to estimate walk-induced forces on structures and identify modal parameters, respectively. First, vibration time history of a walking pedestrian combined with pedestrian weight is a measure of dynamic forces imposed on the structure. Second, standing pedestrian’s smartphone sensors provide spectral peaks which are mixtures of structural and biomechanical vibrations. Eliminating biomechanical content reveals structural modal properties which are sensitive to structural integrity. This study presents the first structural health monitoring application recruiting pedestrians in a testbed bridge monitoring example. Orchestrating pervasive and participatory pedestrian data might bring new frontiers to structural health monitoring through a smart, mobile, and urban sensing framework.