Landslide monitoring system for inhabited areas: a case study in Central Italy

Landslide events pose a significant threat to human settlements, with potentially devastating consequences for infrastructure and public safety. In the years, several ways have been developed to monitor these phenomena; among them, the use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN s) is a widely considered choice because of their flexibility and suitability with Internet of Things (loT) based structures. In this applied research work, a Long Range (LoRa) based WSN for landslide monitoring in the locality of Tortoreto, Italy, is presented. This work has been carried out in collaboration with the municipality in order to ensure the correct choice of an action plan in case of a main landslide event and to observe the natural displacement of the ground. The monitoring solution is aimed to offer reliability at reduced complexity and cost, allowing a preliminary data acquisition campaign for the definition of safety procedures. The system has been in operation since October 2023 with consistent uptime, allowing to gather important information on the movement of the householding foundations. Each node is composed of two sensors and a conditioning circuit for the reading of an external sensor. The single node has an average power consumption in the order of hundreds of microwatt.