The need for structural health monitoring and condition-based maintenance is well established in research literature 1-4
.
Targeted goals include eliminating loss of life and economic loss connected to catastrophic failures and reducing
structure’s life cycle costs. An automated or an automatic monitoring system would largely eliminate the subjectivity of
visual inspections and provide objective and quantifiable results. Wireless and MEMS-based sensor technologies
present an appealing alternative to traditional tethered monitoring systems by offering longer sensor life spans, lower
energy consumption, low equipment costs and lower installation costs. The lower costs of wireless and MEMS-based
monitoring systems will eventually allow moving toward pervasive monitoring of civil infrastructure. As research area
of structural health monitoring matures and moves into the application arena, many new technologies emerge that
address various needs of structural health monitoring. Some systems 5
utilize well-established consumer-oriented
technologies like IEEE802.11a/b/g wireless networks to collect data from bridges and buildings. Such systems have the
advantage of readily available and inexpensive hardware and software but often lack in the functiona