Sensors in smartphones

What are different  sensors are available inside a smartphone..?

Today's smartphones have many sensors which improves our daily users experience. These Sensors are driven by different software and Application .In past users can`t think there will be a proximity sensor which will help us to save battery on long calls or there will be a  light sensor to adjust the screen brightness automatically.

Most Android-powered devices have built-in sensors that measure motion, orientation, and various environmental conditions. These sensors are capable of providing raw data with high precision and accuracy, and are useful if you want to monitor three-dimensional device movement or positioning, or you want to monitor changes in the ambient environment near a device. A weather application might use a device's temperature sensor and humidity sensor to calculate and report the dewpoint, or a travel application might use the geomagnetic field sensor and accelerometer to report a compass bearing.

The Android platform supports three broad categories of sensors:

• Motion sensors:-
  These sensors measure acceleration forces and rotational forces along three axes. This category includes accelerometers, gravity sensors, gyroscopes, and rotational vector sensors.
• Environmental sensors:-
  These sensors measure various environmental parameters, such as ambient air temperature and pressure, illumination, and humidity. This category includes barometers, photometers, and thermometers.
• Position sensors:-
  These sensors measure the physical position of a device. This category includes orientation sensors and magnetometers.

Some of  different  sensors available inside a smartphone

1. Proximity Sensor

A proximity sensor is a sensor which is able to detect the presence of nearby objects without any physical contact. It is placed near the earpiece of a phone,and when you place the handset up to your ear, the sensor lets the system know that you're most probably in a call and that the screen has to be turned off. The sensor works by shining a beam of invisible to humans infrared light which is reflected from a nearby object and picked up by the IR detector.

2. Light sensor

A phone's light sensor is what measures how bright the ambient light is. The phone's software uses this data to adjust the display's brightness automatically, and that's not overkill. In fact, the Adapt Display feature uses this data to fine tune image representation.

3. Barometer

Higher-end phones have a built-in barometer – a sensor that can measure atmospheric pressure. Data measured by it is used to determine how high the device is above sea level, which in turn results in improved GPS accuracy.

4. Magnetometer

The digital compass that's usually based on a sensor called magnetometer provides mobile phones with a simple orientation in relation to the Earth's magnetic field. As a result, your phone always knows which way is North so it can auto rotate your digital maps depending on your physical orientation and gives directions.

5. Gyro sensor

                            

Gyro sensors, also known as angular ratesensors or angular velocity sensors, are devices that sense angular velocity. Angular velocity. In simple terms, angular velocity is the change in rotational angle per unit of time.

These are some of the sensors available in our smartphones through which our daily tasks are made easy.