Welcome to another edition of It’s in the Details, a short newsletter intended to provide helpful information for those in the litigation industry who deal with forensic engineering experts and their work.
Smartphone Apps as Crash Data Recorders
Dial Engineering recently presented the results of our study into the availability and accuracy of data recorded by BMW motorcycle smartphone apps. And what we found was informative.
Motorcycle manufacturers are turning toward monitoring and recording their users’ performance data through OEM-supplied smartphone apps. And, in the case of BMW and others, this can turn out to be a lot of data. Not only vehicle speed and engine speed, but rates of acceleration and deceleration, and even lean angle! And for BMWs, the best part is, all this data gets recorded in the app. Meaning, it’s on the user’s phone, and not in some module on the bike. And better yet, it also gets saved to the cloud, so all someone has to do later is log in to the BMW user’s account from a different device, and voila, all that data becomes available to the reviewer without needing the original phone, which might have gotten lost or damaged during the crash.
So, when making discovery requests in litigated matters, you might keep in mind the potential for apps on the phone to have recorded valuable information regarding the movement of the vehicle in the moments surrounding the crash. Stay tuned for the next issue of our newsletter in which we discuss the ease by which data stored on smartphones can be extracted and viewed.
Thanks for reading, and feel free to reach out to us with any technical questions you might have about this or other topics related to forensic engineering.