Measuring and testing activities have been performed from the beginning of the twentieth century within engineering. Early activities in structural health monitoring were damage identification in aerospace and mechanical engineering. Aircrafts and military vehicles needed monitoring, and a lot of sensors were developed for these purposes. It was also common to perform damage identification with rotating machines, which was called condition monitoring. Organized structural health monitoring (SHM) activities became more acknowledged in the last decades and emerged various engineering disciplines. Today, also many civil engineering structures are monitored continuously and provide true real‐time information of these structures.
Technical development of sensory technology has been rapid and is still ongoing. Several new techniques are available on the market and provide higher performance and innovative, more reliable measurements.
Fiber‐optic sensors, advanced NDT methods such as acoustic emission, radar‐based techniques, in addition to micro electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology together with advanced data acquisition techniques and database automation supply for beneficial SHM. This paper presents new and emerging technologies and new areas of usage; mostly for the civil engineering structures. It highlights their advantages and also brings up with challenges. Some real applications are presented in order to give a true picture about SHM with new and emerging technologies and complexity of the subject.