Infrastructural health monitoring using self-powered Internet-of-Things

By incorporating sensing capabilities in passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tagging technology it is possible to extend the coverage of Internet-of-Things (IoT) to monitor the health of different segments of a large civil infrastructure like pavement highway, buildings or a multi-span bridge. The challenge in this regard is to deliver energy to the RFID sensors that are embedded inside the structures in a manner that they can continuously sense for occurrence of any rare structural events. This paper summarizes some of the progress that has been made to-date in the area of self-powered R FID sensor networks within the concept of IoT. The core sensor uses a self-powering method which directly harvests computational and storage energy from slight strain-variations in the structure. The event signatures can then be stored on a non-volatile memory and remotely retrieved at a later period of time. In this sense now retrieve later paradigm, self-powering is only used for continuous sensing and data-logging of essential statistics; whereas, data retrieval and reconfiguration is achieved using a low-cost commercial RFID system. Another advantage of using a commercial RFID system for data retrieval is that the related standards and FCC compliance are well established and the technology can be easily integrated with other IoT network infrastructure.