A Wireless Sensor Network Platform for Structural Health Monitoring

Structural health monitoring has long been identified as a prominent application of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), as traditional wired-based solutions present some inherent limitations such as installation/maintenance cost, scalability and visual impact. Nevertheless, there is a lack of ready-to-use and off-the-shelf WSN technologies that are able to fulfill some most demanding requirements of these applications, which can span from critical physical infrastructures (e.g. bridges, tunnels, mines, energy grid) to historical buildings or even industrial machinery and vehicles. Low-power and low-cost yet extremely sensitive and accurate accelerometer and signal acquisition hardware and stringent time synchronization of all sensors data are just examples of the requirements imposed by most of these applications. This video shows the a prototype system designed for health monitoring of civil engineering structures. The video is by Ricardo Severino