Accelerometers in Our Pocket: Does Smartphone Accelerometer Technology Provide Accurate Data?

This study evaluates accelerometer performance of three new state of the art smartphones and focuses on accuracy. The motivating research question was whether accelerator accuracy obtained with these off-the-shelf modern smartphone accelerometers was or was not statistically different from that of a gold-standard reference system. We predicted that the accuracy of the three modern smartphone accelerometers in human movement data acquisition do not differ from that of the Vicon MX motion capture system. To test this prediction, we investigated the comparative performance of three different commercially available current generation smartphone accelerometers among themselves and to a gold-standard Vicon MX motion capture system. A single subject design was implemented for this study. Pearson’s correlation coefficients(®) were calculated to verify the validity of the smartphones’ accelerometer data against that of the Vicon MX motion capture system. The Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) was used to assess the smartphones’ accelerometer performance reliability compared to that of the Vicon MX motion capture system. Results demonstrated that (a) the tested smartphone accelerometers are valid and reliable devices for estimating accelerations and (b) there were not significant differences among the three current generation smartphones and the Vicon MX motion capture system’s mean acceleration data. This evidence indicates how well recent generation smartphone accelerometer sensors are capable of measuring human body motion. This study, which bridges a significant information gap between the accuracy of accelerometers measured close to production and their accuracy in actual smartphone research, should be interpreted within the confines of its scope, limitations and strengths. Further research is warranted to validate our arguments, suggestions, and results, since this is the first study on this topic.