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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1

As cars get smarter, more and more of them are going to give their owners preventative maintenance alerts. It's one of the benefits to consumers regularly touted by advocates of the connected car, and even some older cars can get in on the action via aftermarket units that connect to a car's onboard diagnostics port.

However, that last one might not be necessary if a technique being developed by some researchers at MIT pans out. Rather than plugging a diagnostic dongle into a car's controller area network—with the attendant hacking risk—Joshua Siegel and his colleagues reckon a smartphone's microphone and accelerometers could be sufficient.

Some of his research has just been published in Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence; specifically a paper that shows that audio data collected by a smartphone alone can diagnose an air filter that needs to be changed.

The idea behind it is quite simple. A dirty or occluded filter—blocked by leaves, for example—will let a different flow of air through it than one that's working as designed. And that difference will result in different auditory and vibratory signals. (This is important because a dirtier or occluded filter won't send the optimal amount of cold fresh air to the engine, which means worse fuel economy and increased wear.)

Source: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/these-mit-researchers-want-to-use-your-phones-mic-to-diagnose-car-trouble/

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