Post-earthquake fast building safety assessment using smartphone-based interstory drifts measurement

Rather than using smartphones as seismometers with designated locations and orientations, this study proposes to employ crowds' smartphones in buildings to perform fast safety assessment of buildings. The principal advantage of using crowds' smartphones is the potential to monitor the safety of millions of buildings without hardware costs, installation labor, and long-term maintenance. This study's goal is to measure the maximum interstory drift ratios during earthquake excitation using crowds' smartphones. Beacons inside the building are required to provide the location and relevant building information for the smartphones via Bluetooth. Wi-Fi Direct is employed between nearby smartphones to conduct peer-to-peer time synchronization and exchange the acceleration data measured. An algorithm to align the orientation between nearby smartphones is proposed, and the performance of the orientation alignment, interstory drift measurement, and damage level estimation are studied numerically. Finally, the proposed approach's performance is verified using large-scale shaking table tests of a scaled steel building. The results presented in this study illustrate the potential to use crowds' smartphones with the proposed approach to record building motions during earthquakes and use those data to estimate buildings' safety based on the interstory drift ratios measured.