Performance assessment of vibration sensing using smartdevices

Machine Condition Monitoring (MCM) is become crucial in all industrial processes to achieve high reliability, reduced man power and scheduled maintenance. The cost reduction of diagnostic tool allows for on line testing, and user-friendly interfaces minimize requirements about technician expertise. For all these reasons, the use of smart devices (including smartphone, tablets, PDA...) has been suggested in the past to implement handheld MCM tools, exploiting embedded accelerometer(s). However, there are no works about performance assessment of vibration analysis performed using smartdevice embedded sensors. In this work, authors have realized experimental testbeds mimicking real-world scenarios in order to overcome this lack. Experimental results show performance comparable with stand-alone sensors in the low frequency range; however, limitations due to the operating system must be carefully considered with wideband excitation.