State of the art and future developments of measurement applications on smartphones

The modern smartphones contain different sensor technologies, so they can be used as stand-alone measurement instruments on a wide range of application domains. The paper deals with a survey of measurement applications based on smartphones. In the first part, the evolution of mobile phone technologies, including the sensors and mobile networks developments, is presented. Then, in order to highlight the sensors and the communication capabilities, the architectural overview of the hardware and software technologies, which are available on latest series of smartphones, is reported and discussed. A review of measurements applications using the smart sensors and the communication interfaces available on smartphones, it is also presented. A classification of smartphone applications, which looks the smartphone as a handheld measurement instrument, is presented. In the last part, the integration of augmented reality to the measurement applications and new type of measurement systems, having a smartphone as processing support, is presented. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.