Analysing an autorickshaw ride in Bangalore

The bumpy ride on the Bangalore streets triggered a thought the other day, why not log the data and analyse it later(whackily purposeless initially). 

The desire to log is esp. a fallout of my recent stint with user studies dealing with data cleaning/analysis and deriving statistical results from it: formally two-way ANOVA tests, T-tests etc. and who doesn't love clean graphs telling a story :-)

Without giving much thought, I tied my Macbook Pro equipped with SuddenMotionSensor(SMS) to the auto-rickshaw seat and used http://www.shiffman.net/p5/sms/ to log the X/Y/Z axis data in CSV format. I manually kept a record through a stopwatch about the potholes/pit occurrence during the 25 minute rick-ride. It was interesting to the see the outliers due to the sudden relative motion triggered jerks.

Ankit and I plotted a few qualitative graphs out of the sampled CSV data(6731 datalogs). I matched the spikes with the manually recorded pothole/sudden-jerk data to see the obvious but visually pleasing results :)

Red color shows the X, Orange shows the Y and Blue shows the Z displacements. 

I dont know the exact use of this approach. Just that cheap accelerometers could be a good way to present the logged data as analytics to the user. Next time I'll commute the same route through a citybus and share my analysis within the same blogpost. :-) If anyone's interested in the raw manual+automatically recorded data, let me know!