It costs a lot to maintain bridges. In the US there are 600,000 of them, and the organizations that own and maintain them can easily pay $50,000 for sensor equipment alone, with further costs incurred by the need to maintain them and analyze the data they generate. It's a cheaper option to use a mobile device.
Ahmet Emin Aktan is a professor of civil, architectural, and environmental engineering and was not involved in the study. It will take a long time before the technique is widely used.
For the next 10 to 20 years, Aktan expects visual inspections to be the primary method of bridge monitoring because both sensors and smartphones can produce data that is harder to interpret than what engineers see with their own eyes. It's not unusual for weather or traffic load to affect how structures behave and move. They become stiff in the cold.
But eventually, he says, it’s likely that the industry will want to use a combination of that visual observation with the data collected from smartphones.
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