This article presents a novel framework for monitoring and evaluation of a population of bridges using smartphones in a large number of moving vehicles as mobile sensors. Within this framework, a damage detection methodology based on Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and Kullback–Leibler divergence is developed. For this method, Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients of the vibration data collected from smartphones in vehicles crossing bridges are first extracted as features. Then, Kullback–Leibler divergence is used to compare the distributions of features. The damage in a bridge can be identified by quantifying the difference of the distributions obtained for the same bridge. Both numerical and lab experiments are conducted to verify the proposed framework and methodology. In lab experiments, a smartphone and two wireless accelerometers are used for data collection. From our results, it is concluded that the damage existence can be successfully identified using smartphones in a large number of vehicles. Also, it is observed that there is a significant correlation between the magnitude of the damage features and the severity of damage. The results show that the method has the potential to monitor a population of bridges simultaneously and in almost real time.

Traditional bridge health monitoring methods that necessitate sensor installation are not only costly but also time‐consuming. In contrast, utilizing smartphone data collected from vehicles as they traverse bridges offers an efficient and cost‐effective alternative. This paper introduces a cutting‐edge damage detection framework for indirect monitoring of bridge structures, leveraging a substantial volume of acceleration data collected from smartphones in vehicles passing over the bridge. Our innovative approach addresses the challenge of collecting and transmitting high‐frequency data while preserving smartphone battery life and data plans through the integration of compressed sensing (CS) into the crowdsensing‐based monitoring framework. CS employs random sampling and signal recovery from a significantly reduced number of samples compared to the requirements of the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. In the proposed framework, acceleration signals from vehicles are initially acquired using smartphone sensors, undergo compression, and are then transmitted for signal reconstruction. Subsequently, feature extraction and dimensionality reduction are performed using Mel‐frequency cepstral coefficients and principal component analysis. Damage indexes are computed based on the dissimilarity between probability distribution functions utilizing the Wasserstein distance metric. The efficacy of the proposed methodology in bridge monitoring has been substantiated through the utilization of numerical models and a lab‐scale bridge. Furthermore, the feasibility of implementing the framework in a real‐world application has been investigated, leveraging the smartphone data from 102 vehicle trips on the Golden Gate Bridge. The results demonstrate that damage detection using the reconstructed signals obtained through compressed sensing achieves comparable performance to that obtained with the original data sampled at the Nyquist measurement sampling rate. However, it is observed that to retain severity information within the signals for accurate damage severity identification, the compression level should be limited to 20%. These findings affirm that compressed sensing significantly reduces the data collection requirements for crowdsensing‐based monitoring applications, without compromising the accuracy of damage detection while preserving essential damage‐sensitive information within the dataset.