Post-earthquake Building Safety Assessment Using Crowdsourcing-based Interstory Drifts Measurement

Post-earthquake Building Safety Assessment Using Crowdsourcing-based Interstory Drifts Measurement

This study proposes to employ people’s smartphones to assess a building’s post-earthquake safety. The goal is to measure the maximum interstory drift ratios during earthquake excitation by using people’s 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. We propose an algorithm that can be used to align the orientations of nearby smartphones, and we studied the performance of the orientation alignment, interstory drift measurement, and damage level estimation numerically. The results presented in this study illustrate the potential of using people’s smartphones with the proposed approach to record building motions during earthquakes and using that data to estimate a building’s safety based on the interstory drift ratios measured.