Structural health monitoring (SHM) is critical to ensure safety of civil infrastructure, such as bridges, railways, or pipelines. However, existing SHM techniques suffer from high investment, installation, and maintenance cost. This paper presents an ultra-low-cost and easy-to-use wireless SHM system for civil infrastructure, featuring real-time sensing, on-board data analysis, energy-efficient wireless communication, and Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity. To validate its performance, the proposed SHM system is installed at Itztal Bridge, Germany, for monitoring and analyzing quasi-static horizontal deck displacements in response to thermal loads. In parallel to the ultra-low-cost SHM system, a traditional tethered SHM system, also installed at the bridge, is used in this study for direct comparison and validation. As a result, the ultra-low-cost wireless SUM system is shown to be easy-to-install and sufficiently accurate for monitoring and analyzing the behavior of civil infrastructure under static loads, serving as a low-cost yet high-performance diagnostic tool with IoT connectivity.
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