The US study by Dr. Thomas Matarazzo comes after 143 people perished when a footbridge in the Indian state of Gujarat collapsed last Sunday.
A new study claims that data collected from Uber drivers’ smartphones could be used to monitor bridges and prevent their collapse.
According to the research, collecting drivers’ GPS location and acceleration data – both of which are automatically recorded by ridesharing applications like Uber – provides structural engineers with crucial information about a bridge’s health.
It would allow near-constant real-time monitoring of a bridge’s integrity and might potentially minimize the number of fatal bridge collapses.
The study, directed by Dr. Thomas Matarazzo, associate director of the US Military’s Center for Innovation in Engineering, follows the Sunday collapse of a footbridge in the Indian state of Gujarat, in which 143 people were killed.
The 230-foot (70-meter) bridge had just been rebuilt and reopened to the public the previous week.
Officials told Press Trust India at the time that it collapsed because it could not support the volume of passengers.
A metro bridge in Mexico City, Mexico, collapsed in May 2021, killing 26 people, and the Ponte Morandi bridge in Genoa, Italy, collapsed in August 2018, killing 43 people.
In Dr. Matarazzo’s study, researchers drove 102 times across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco while recording their motions with iPhone 5s and 6s.
Then, information was gathered from 72 Uber bridge journeys while drivers went about their daily lives.
Typically, bridge inspections are conducted visually, without the use of data.
According to the study: “Modern bridge condition assessments are reliant on field inspection notes from visual inspections rather than big digital databases – a paradigm that drastically limits the frequency of structural health checks.
Researchers claim that structural engineers can precisely estimate the low-grade vertical vibrations and twisting that bridges suffer during their lifetimes by using rideshare data that can be collected daily.
They said that with 50 percent of the world’s population using smartphones, this might be a simple and cost-free solution to improve bridge safety.
And despite the limited sample size, the authors assert that their findings are mainly accurate.
There have been privacy issues regarding drivers’ data, with experts fearing that digital corporations do not respect the rights of their employees.
However, other drivers have expressed support for the program, stating that they are pleased to assist prevent possibly fatal accidents.
