Bio-inspired Sensors for Structural Health Monitoring

An Overview on Structural Health Monitoring: From the Current State-of-the-Art to New Bio-inspired Sensing Paradigms

“…Moreover, wires are susceptible to tearing, rodent nibbling and measurement corruption through signal noise, thus they need to be isolated from the harsh environment, causing a further increase in the cost and time of installation (Lynch et al, 2000). This is why tethered monitoring systems typically lack a high spatial density of sensors, resulting in sparsely distributed and poorly scaled networks (Loh et al, 2015). Low sensor densities provide insight into the low-order modal properties of the structure, but for damage detection purposes there is a need for greater monitoring fidelity that is only achievable by highly increasing the number of measurement points (Lynch et al, 2000).…”

“…Shifting from computing to sensing technologies, the unique functionalities and properties of the skin of humans, animals, and insects have led to active research in developing skin-inspired tactile sensors as well as distributed strain sensors that take advantage of nanotechnology-derived materials (Loh et al, 2015). In particular, in the context of SHM, skin-like distributed sensing coupling piezoresistive CNT (carbon nanotubes)-based thin films (fabricated using layer-by-layer assembly) with an electrical impedance tomography (EIT) algorithm have been achieved for strain monitoring and damage detection purposes (Loh and Azhari, 2012).…”

“…To obtain reliable and high quality structural information, it is important to monitor the structural behavior at finegrained level, ensuring a sufficiently large number of sensors. Unfortunately, in what concerns civil structures, budget limitations often result in the installation of sparsely distributed monitoring systems, poorly scaled with structural damage, mainly because of the high costs associated with traditional tethered systems (Loh et al, 2015). Numerous wireless technologies have emerged over the past decades aiming at providing relatively inexpensive sensor platforms with densely distributed data acquisition nodes for autonomous SHM and damage detection.…”

IoT Wearable Devices for Health Issue Monitoring Using 5G Networks’ Opportunities and Challenges

“…In healthcare applications, finding out a suitable solutions based on different factors such as the time interval (latency), battery life, dynamic range, throughput, adaptability, coverage, and organizational model [4,5] is a challenging issue. There are a lot of applications and health status for remote monitoring available in homes, hospital rooms, and wearable invasive or noninvasive devices which a combination of the short-and long-range communication technologies is necessary [6][7][8][9]. Figure 20.1 shows how healthcare devices get the streaming data through inputs from wearable devices and then send the same to the cloud to be analyzed by healthcare services to visualize its overall impact.…”

“…There is much more interest in employing IoT based on 5G connections and edge computing to be applied in wearable devices' applications [5]. Based on a new study in 2020 that was carried out by the Grand View Research surveys, the healthcare IoT market has considerably reached $330 billion in investments [6].…”