Mobile phones have vibratory motors which can transmit vibration, and accelerometers, which can sense vibration. Rumblecation takes advantage of this hardware to communicate over vibration. Vibratory communication would limit the communication domain to two or more physically coupled devices, and this could be used to pair a specific subset of devices sharing a surface such as table.

Custom hardware was developed to closely emulate the hardware found in common smartphones. A simple protocol was then designed for vibratory communication and firmware was developed for our hardware to implement this protocol.

Current work is focused on improving data rate and reliability, which should be achievable by improving the algorithms that are processing accelerometer data.