A low-cost IoT-based wireless sensor system for bridge displacement monitoring

Abstract

The intelligent monitoring of bridges has become vital as the number of bridges increases. Displacement measurements are useful information for structural health monitoring, which is the key method to ensure structural safety. However, most cable-based displacement measurements are costly and labor-intensive, and wireless measurements are limited by transmission distance and have difficulties in equipment maintenance and data management. The Internet of things approach provides a new technical method for addressing this challenge. This paper designs a low-cost IoT-based sensor system for bridge displacement monitoring, which consists of a sensor transducer, an amplifier circuit, an microprogrammed control unit module, an IoT wireless communication module and a cloud server. The proposed system can collect the displacement data accurately and send the data to the server by utilizing low-power wireless communication technology-NB-IoT. The analysis and visualization can be remotely performed via a web interface. Experiments and field tests show that the system can be successfully implemented in bridge displacement monitoring applications.