Motorists with smartphones could help highway chiefs maintain road quality by sending “crowdsourced” data from their mobiles that would allow engineers to assess when carriageway repairs are needed, according to a new UK study.
Road roughness is an important measure of condition and ride quality, but many agencies around the world with large road networks lack the resources to regularly check the state of their highways and make informed maintenance decisions.
Using high resolution three-axis accelerometers and GPS tracking already built into smartphones – together with a low-cost app – to record how a vehicle moves vertically in relation to the carriageway can provide a useful measure of road roughness for civil engineers.
