Evaluation of Smartphone’s Embedded Sensors Through Applications: A Case Study of Gyroscope and Accelerometer

Abstract

Smartphones are used for many daily activities like tele-communication, gaming, web browsing, fitness and health monitoring and traditional office working. Smartphones are equipped with built-in sensors to be able to perform these activities. It is well known that the sensors affect the resolution of the smartphone applications which is very vital in life critical applications (LCA). In this paper, two main sensors, the gyroscope and accelerometer have been studied. All commercial smartphones contain these two sensors and support functions related to them. These two sensors have direct link with the physical measurements which feed the fitness and health applications. A fitness application has been selected and ran under Android and iOS operating systems in two different popular smartphones: Samsung Note5 and iPhone7s smartphones. Statistical methodology has been applied to analysis the data and evaluate the performance of the sensors. The results show that commercial smartphones are not reliable devices for motion-related measurements and they can only be used for general purpose monitoring but not in life critical applications.