Android Application To Assess Smartphone Accelerometers And Bluetooth For Real-Time Control

Modern smart phones have evolved into sophisticated embedded systems, incorporating hardware and software features that make the devices potentially useful for real-time control operations. An object-oriented Android application was developed to quantify the performance of the smartphone's on-board linear accelerometers and bluetooth wireless module with a view to potentially transmitting accelerometer data wirelessly between bluetooth-enabled devices. A portable bluetooth library was developed which runs the bluetooth functionality of the application as an independent background service. The performance of bluetooth was tested by pinging data between 2 smartphones, measuring round-trip-time and round-trip-time variation (jitter) against variations in data size, transmission distance and sources of interference. The accelerometers were tested for sampling frequency and sampling frequency jitter.