IceSound: Acoustic-based Ice Thickness Sensing with Smartphones
Journal: Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive Mobile Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
Year: 2025

Accurate measurement of ice thickness is essential for safety in ice-related human activities; however, existing solutions are often cumbersome or expensive. We present IceSound, a novel system that leverages the ubiquity of smartphones to realize portable, cost-effective, and real-time ice thickness sensing. IceSound tackles multiple challenges including overlapping echoes due to the higher sound speed in ice (approximately 3250 m/s), weak bottom reflections due to attenuation in thick ice, and