This paper presents SHiMmer, a wireless platform for active sensing that combines localized processing with energy harvesting to provide long-lived structural health monitoring. The life-cycle of the node is extended to 20 years by the use of super-capacitors for energy storage. During this period the node is expected to work completely maintenance-free. The node is capable of harvesting up to 780J per day. This makes it completely self-sufficient while employed in real structural health monitoring applications. Unlike other sensor networks that periodically monitor a structure and route information to a base station, our device acquires the data and processes it locally after being radio-triggered by an external agent. The localized processing allows us to avoid issues due to network congestion. Our experiments show that its 32-bits computational core can run at 100MIPS for 15 minutes daily.

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