Remote monitoring of vehicle shock and vibrations

This paper describes the development of a new device to remotely monitor shocks and vibrations generated by industrial and commercial transport vehicles. The acceleration levels are measured with an accelerometer connected to a programmable microprocessor equipped with analogue-to-digital converters and wireless communication modules. The paper gives a thorough description of the system, which relies on the real-time analysis and compression of shock and vibration data to enable efficient data transmission to a host computer station via wireless terrestrial and satellite networks. The host computer accommodates a purpose-designed software program to store the received information in a database, as well as to compute and display shock and vibration levels, trends and statistics. The system is designed so that configuration, data retrieval and analysis are performed remotely via standard Internet browsers. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.