Internet of things (IoT)-based structural health monitoring of laboratory-scale civil engineering structures

Rapid advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain have made it a crucial technology for the real-time structural health monitoring (SHM) of civil engineering infrastructures. The availability of quick and accurate vibration data is essential for SHM, and such data can be obtained through IoT devices mounted on the structures. This study proposes a real-time damage prediction and localization approach using a low-cost "do-it-yourself" wireless sensor node with IoT capabilities for SHM. The proposed sensor node comprised a microcontroller (NODE MCU ESP8266) and a 6-axis accelerometer (MPU6050). The IoT devices track the real-time frequency of the laboratory-scale structure indirectly via measurement of acceleration-time history, and their results are compared with conventional industry-standard accelerometers. Promising results, with a <6% average difference from the conventional accelerometer (difference ranging from 1.3 to 14.3%), provided an innovative SHM for vibration-based real-time SHM using the IoT paradigm. The performance of the proposed methodology was validated numerically and experimentally on two laboratory-scale structures, and the potential of IoT technology for enhancing the efficiency of SHM was demonstrated. The proposed method thus can enable the early detection of damages in infrastructures such as buildings and bridges and thus can reduce the likelihood of accidents via continuous SHM.