Wire rope safety barriers reduce the risk of death and injury from road accidents, but require regular visual and physical inspections to ensure the correct tension is maintained. To reduce inspection costs and provide quicker information, Viotel has developed a Smart barrier monitoring system. Monitoring units can be installed in under 5 minutes using a rolling lane closure, and provide hourly measurements of wire rope tension as well as real-time information about significant impacts on the barrier. Solar panels and batteries are used to power the units.
Trials of this system in Australia and New Zealand have demonstrated the effects of ambient temperature on barrier tension with diurnal and seasonal variations.  Impacts have been detected using vibration monitoring and in some cases the resulting tension drop due to impact damage has been quantified.  The real-time data of flexible barrier condition can be used to prioritise and schedule maintenance. These field trials have demonstrated that the low costs and power consumption of IoT technology has enabled practical and cost-effective wide-scale monitoring of every wire rope barrier.  This type of monitoring is useful to gain real-time information about the tension of flexible barriers in order to schedule and prioritise maintenance in order to ensure the barrier tensions are out of the specified ranges for as little time as possible, with important benefits for road safety.  The technology has also been adapted to hard barrier and crash cushion monitoring, which are actually easier assets to monitor.