A Citizen-Centric Health Monitoring Paradigm Using Embedded Self-Locating Wireless Sensor Networks

While integrated health monitoring systems are often presented as a solution to the national infrastructure crisis, this project adopts a unique variation on this theme by actively seeking to remove barriers that have precluded non-expert citizen's direct use of these systems. Often the expense and need for expert involvement in most structural health monitoring programs means that the vast majority of bridges, including those that are structurally deficient and in greatest need of assessment, cannot benefit from these efforts. By recognizing that our target end users have limited budgets and large inventories of bridges, this project delivers to these end users a rapidly re-deployable, self-organizing wireless sensor network. However, by providing end users full freedom to deploy these units at will, this project must do something all competing efforts have not: operate without full knowledge of where sensors are placed not only in detecting damage but also in relaying that information through a wireless network. This paper focuses specifically on how this wireless network will be activated in a restricted fashion, the hardware necessary to do so, and the sensing elements that will be activated to detect damage packaged for rapid, repeated, re-deployment by end users through autonomous localization.