The pictures showed stresses and problems on bridges and roads concerning the destruction by earthquakes for example. The American Society of Civil Engineers and the 2003 Report Card for America's Infrastructure summarised that the condition of constructed facilities and the state of the US infrastructure is rated as follows:

• Roads D+
• Bridges C
• Transit C
• Aviation D
• Schools D
• Drinking Water D

The ratings are: A=Exceptional, B=Good, C=Fair, D=Poor, E=Inadequate. America's infrastructure G.P.A. is D+, the total investments needed amount to 1.6 trillion US$.

Frieder Seible proposed to install sensors and connect them to a network, to early recognise problems of the building. The vision deployed proposes thousands of heterogeneous sensors, a sensor network. For a bridge for example, there are cameras needed. Additionally the vibration, the traffic load, the wind speed, the displacement, the strain, the temperature and the humidity have to be measured. The sensors have to be easily accessed and deployed.

Seible wanted to go off of wires, wireless communication is essential. All the data has to be analysed by a decision-support server on the Internet. All this has to be done in real-time. The results will be archived, the analysis as well as the decision.

The Protective Force Technology Centre is an organisation of several universities. There are visualisation and interactive systems. In the Disaster Management, SDSC has simulated and visualised the dynamic behaviour of large structures undergoing stress, deformation, and damage. The stereographic images give a better 3D understanding of structural information. In the SDSC's Augmented Reality in the Field project, they are developing systems and software to overlay annotations and computer graphics onto views of the real world. They use head-mounted displays and wearable computers.

First responders and law enforcement personnel will perceive the three-dimensional interiors of structures, instantly locate critical points in a visual scene, and access maps while responding to emergencies.

An Intelligent Physical Infrastructure can monitor its environment, sense its condition, do something about it, and express information internally or externally. All this has to happen now, as the speaker stressed.

A true Structural Health Monitoring requires damage prognosis through validated simulations, tele-inspection via UVs, multi-use sensors and networks, ubiquitous access to fully searchable data, interactive visualisation tools, automated data archiving, and an integrated safety and security management.

Frieder Seible mentioned that some of these advances will come in the form of new materials and new structural concepts and systems. The major breakthrough will come from a ubiquitous cyberinfrastructure, consisting of distributed multi-use sensor nets, wireless and high speed networks, fully searchable data bases, and data mining tools to provide the operator and the end user with on-line information and knowledge, resulting in improved infrastructure systems management and use.

http://healthmonitoring.ucsd.edu