Development of a wireless sensor network to monitor historic structures

Historic structures are often of extraordinary architecture, design or material. The conservation of such structures for next generations of European population is one of the main tasks, monument conservators are responsible for. To conserve historic structures it is more and more required to understand the deterioration processes mainly caused by the environment. The installation of continuous monitoring systems could help to obtain more detailed information about such deterioration processes. The paper shows the state-of-the-art of competitive and smart wireless sensor network hardware for monitoring structures. A special focus is on the hardware including appropriate low power signal conditioning with respect to reliable and event-based data acquisition.