Engineers at University of Texas at Austin are trying to design small wireless sensors to monitor bridges.The university has been from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to help develop the bridge monitoring systems. The work will be a collaboration between several different departments at UT, including civil, electrical and mechanical engineering.

The United States has about 600,000 highway bridges, 25% of which are rated as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

The engineers will work together to develop a network of low-power wireless sensors that can be placed on existing bridges. The sensors will continuously monitor existing bridges for fractures.

How will the sensors be powered? It's interesting to note that the sensors won't depend on electrical energy, rather they will use solar or wind energy.

"What we'll be doing is real-time monitoring of the bridge," said Sharon L. Wood, the principal investigator and the chair of the , .