Measuring Work Environment Factors by Everyone Using Smartphones

Abstract

The impact of work environment factors has to be considered in an integrated ergonomic analyzing and designing process. To capture relevant environmental exposures, measurements must be carried out. In companies, an increasing use of smartphones for initial measurements of work environment factors can be noticed. Here, the question arises whether it is possible to determine adequate data for scientific work analyses by using built-in sensors in smartphones. For that purpose, the operational readiness of smartphone applications to measure the work environment factors noise, climate and lighting is investigated. Here, the assessing of measuring accuracy and the recordable measurement quantities for different combinations of applications and smartphones is analyzed. In result, a wide variety of the measurement accuracy for the analyzed environmental factors can be observed.