Sensor networks and AI push structural health monitoring toward a $8.6 billion market by 2035

The global structural health monitoring market stood at $3.6 billion in 2025. By 2035, Custom Market Insights projects it will reach $8.6 billion, a compound annual growth rate of 9.1% that reflects mounting pressure on asset owners in civil infrastructure, energy, aerospace, and heavy industry to move from scheduled inspections to continuous, sensor-driven condition awareness.

That trajectory puts structural health monitoring among the faster-growing segments within the broader sensor and industrial IoT space. The 2026 valuation is pegged at approximately $3.9 billion, according to the same Custom Market Insights report published July 16, meaning meaningful budget allocation decisions are already happening across procurement cycles this year.

What the technology stack actually looks like

Structural health monitoring pulls together strain gauges, accelerometers, fiber optic sensors, acoustic emission sensors, vibration sensors, and temperature sensors into integrated systems that feed data to acquisition platforms over wired or wireless networks. That data layer is increasingly the easier part to specify. The differentiation now lives in what happens above the sensors.

According to Custom Market Insights, AI, machine learning, cloud computing, edge computing, and digital twins have become the primary analytical layers that sit on top of sensor networks. The shift is significant for procurement teams: an SHM contract is no longer just a hardware and installation scope. It now bundles ongoing software licensing, edge compute infrastructure, and model retraining cycles into what looks more like a managed-data service.

The market segments by installation type into retrofit and new construction. Both represent distinct procurement contexts. Retrofit deployments on existing bridges, dams, and industrial facilities require integration with legacy control environments and often involve wireless sensor configurations to avoid civil modification costs. New construction projects can specify SHM architectures from the ground up, embedding continuous monitoring as a design requirement rather than an afterthought.

Verticals and the drivers behind each

Civil infrastructure, bridges and tunnels, and buildings and facilities are the core demand pools identified by Custom Market Insights. Aging asset bases in North America and Europe, combined with stricter inspection regulations following high-profile structural failures globally, have pushed facility owners and government infrastructure agencies to move from time-based inspection schedules to condition-based intervention models. SHM provides the data layer that makes that shift operationally credible.

Aerospace and defense represents a different procurement logic. Here the driver is not aging stock but certification requirements and the cost of grounding assets for physical inspection. Continuous monitoring of airframe components reduces inspection downtime and supports extended service interval approvals from regulators. Energy and power adds wind turbine towers, offshore platforms, and pipeline corridors to the addressable equipment base.

Mining and heavy industry rounds out the verticals. Slope stability monitoring at open-pit operations, tailings dam surveillance, and underground tunnel integrity assessment are all applications where a structural failure carries both catastrophic safety consequences and operational shutdown risk measured in days or weeks of lost production.

Connection to the broader digital monitoring wave

Structural health monitoring does not sit in isolation. It is one expression of a wider shift toward continuous, sensor-based monitoring that is reshaping operations across industries. Market.us Media reported in July 2026 that the global digital health market, which encompasses telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, wearable devices, and AI-driven diagnostics, was valued at $287.8 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $2.19 trillion by 2034 at a 22.5% CAGR.

The parallel is instructive for enterprise buyers evaluating either domain. In digital health, the services segment led all product categories in 2024, capturing 48.9% of revenue according to Market.us Media. Telehealthcare, the closest analogue to remote structural monitoring, held the largest technology share at 38.4%. Both figures point toward the same operational pattern: continuous remote observation, backed by analytics, is outpacing episodic or device-only solutions across multiple monitoring categories.

For facilities, infrastructure, and operations teams, that convergence has a practical implication. The vendor ecosystems for industrial IoT and digital monitoring are maturing simultaneously, which means integration standards, data governance frameworks, and AI model procurement practices developed for one domain increasingly transfer to the other.

Vendor landscape and what to evaluate

Custom Market Insights names a broad competitive field in the SHM space, including NovaMetrix LLC, Bruel and Kjaer GmbH, Strainstall UK (James Fisher), Senceive Ltd., COWI A/S, Acellent Technologies Inc., Digitexx Data Systems, National Instruments Corporation, Kinemetrics Inc., Geocomp Corporation, Campbell Scientific Inc., Structural Monitoring Systems PLC, LORD MicroStrain (Parker LORD), Sixense Group, RST Instruments Ltd., SGS SA, Sensuron LLC, and Bridge Diagnostics, among others.

That breadth signals a market still in consolidation. Buyers evaluating vendors should distinguish between hardware-led integrators building up software capability and software-first platforms acquiring or partnering for sensor coverage. The former typically carry stronger field installation references; the latter tend to offer more flexible data integration with existing asset management or ERP environments.

Monitoring frequency is the other key evaluation dimension. Periodic monitoring remains the default for many legacy contracts, but the market is moving toward continuous configurations as sensor costs fall and wireless backhaul options improve. For asset owners managing large portfolios of structures, continuous monitoring at scale requires clarity on data sovereignty, edge versus cloud processing architecture, and alert threshold governance before a contract is signed. The $8.6 billion endpoint is a market projection; for procurement teams, the real number to manage is the total cost of ownership across the sensor, software, integration, and data lifecycle.