Currently, the monitoring of bridges in China heavily relies on manual operation, which has several major problems. It generally takes a very long time to complete an inspection process on bridges. The manual data is sometimes unreliable or even wrong in the case of careless operation. The inspection activity itself is dangerous for inspectors, e.g., bridges are located in the sea or river. Some semi-automatic monitoring methods are recently employed, but they are either very expensive or do

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... work properly. Therefore, the traditional bridge monitoring process becomes an increasing challenge for bridge operators. In this paper, a real-time and automatic bridge monitoring system is presented to meet the bridge monitoring needs, and MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) are the key building block in this system. By using the MEMS-based sensors, it is much more efficient and accurate in monitoring bridges with the measurement of inclination, acceleration, displacement, moisture, temperature, stress and other data.