RELEVANT INFORMATION ABOUT USING A MOBILE PHONE ACCELERATION SENSOR IN PHYSICS EXPERIMENTS

In a recent issue of this journal, Castro-Palacio, Velázquez-Abad, Giménez, and Monsoriu describe an interesting method to analyze free and damped harmonic oscillations using a mobile phone.¹ In their introduction, they give a brief overview of published examples of experiments using new media such as digital cameras, webcams, game-console controllers (e.g., the wiimote), and so on. Unfortunately, they neglected to mention numerous published articles that describe the use of different internal sensors of mobile phones in general,^2–17 and the acceleration sensor of these devices in particular.^18–23 Notably, different aspects of oscillation phenomena using acceleration sensors of mobile phones^24–28 had already been published at the time their article appeared. Readers who are interested in these types of experiments should also keep an eye on the monthly column iPhysicsLabs, initiated in the February 2012 issue of The Physics Teacher. This column presents short experiments that use...