What is Real Vibrations ?

This web site is home to a digital database containing numerical time series and spectral representations of experimentally acquired vibration signals.
Most importantly, Real Vibrations is a participatory research project that aims at creating the world largest repository of vibrations recorded from everyday life objects and people movements.
Cars, trains, airplanes, and even human beings, constantly vibrate and these vibrations can be recorded with various devices and stored in such a way that they are readily available and easily usable both by researchers and non expert visitors.

What are these data for?

A database of vibration data is a map of the moving world. To many this is of no meaning and little use. To us this is a map of potentially useful energy. In fact vibrations can be efficiently transformed in electrical energy that can be employed to power electronic devices such as wireless sensors: a way to improve the microelectronic world and make a better use of energy.
In a near future we believe that this micro-generators that transform vibrations into electric energy will be able to integrate and/or substitute the existing batteries for a better and healthier planet.

How to take part in the project ?

If you are a scientist or a professional in the energy world, please contact the NiPS Laboratory at the Department of Physics, University of Perugia in order to become a professional partner of the Real Vibrations project.
If you are a student and/or a volunteer you can still contribute to this project simply by acquiring vibration data with your smartphone and uploading them to the database.

Nanopower

Real Vibrations is developed under the Nanopower project, that acknowledges the financial support of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme within the ICT theme of the Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission (Grant Agreement n. 256959).

EnABLES

EnABLES provides fully funded access to key European Research Infrastructures in powering the Internet of Things (IoT). Industrial and academic researchers & integrators can now address the key challenges required to enable truly ‘invisible’, unobtrusive and self-powered (autonomous) wireless devices by having access to state-of-the art facilities and expertise at the EnABLES partner sites. This collaborative approach will help bridge the gap between capturing ‘ambient’ energy supply from energy harvesting sources (EH), integrating new devices for energy storage (ES) and developing micro-power management (MPM) solutions for miniaturised system operation. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 730957.

Since April 2019 the Real Vibrations Database has been incorporated in the EnABLES project to offer to the users, by a Virtual Access, information about the energy that could be harvested from common sources.

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Photo credits: "Good Vibrations," Thomas Alper Alper, 2011 High School Physics Photo Contest
Used by permission of the American Association of Physics Teachers