Design of a Multi-Modal and High Computation Power Wireless Sensor Node for Structural Health Monitoring

This paper presents the hardware and software design of a wireless sensor node for structural health monitoring. The unique features of the presented sensor node are its high computational capability, multi-modal sensing, and the combined ability for both active sensing and passive sensing. The open software architecture design approach for the upper layer application software promotes software reuse and speeds up the development cycle by employing available numerical algorithms in open software packages such as CLAPACK and numerical recipes in C. The multi-modal sensing capability allows the sensor node having a broader view of the monitoring structure with integrated information from different types of sensors.