Assessing Disability Using Smartphone

The Americans With Disabilities Act Compliance Assessment Toolkit (ADACAT) provides simple, pass-fail assessments of the requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) and other accessibility standards to assess the architectural barriers of the built environment. The ADACAT includes a Measurement Kit, which consists of various measuring instruments like, measuring tape, sound-level meter, light-level meter, magic slope block, etc. In this paper, we show that many of the instruments in the Measurement Kit can be effectively (having acceptable accuracy) implemented as a software application on a smartphone equipped with sensors like, accelerometer, gyroscope, and microphone. We provide detailed algorithms and experimental results showing that an iPhone or iPod Touch 4.0 application can serve as measuring tape, sound-level meter, as well as slope meter, making the ADACAT both cheaper and more portable.