Overall, the U.S. infrastructure of bridges, tunnels and roads is in very poor shape, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) declared in 2009 (though some U.S. government stimulus funding has since been allocated for improvements). In 2007, a Minnesota bridge spanning the Mississippi river collapsed, killing 13 people.

Laflamme and his team are not the only ones to develop systems to continually monitor infrastructure. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory developed a wireless embedded sensor platform that could of bridges and relay the results back for analysis.

The IDG News Service