Real-Time Monitoring in Geotechnical Instrumentation: Why It’s Never Truly Real-Time

Ali Siamaki

The Myth of “Real-Time”

In the age of IoT and digital platforms, the phrase real-time monitoring is everywhere. Vendors promise instant insights, dashboards show live graphs, and project teams are told they can act “immediately” when parameters shift. But in geotechnical instrumentation and monitoring, real-time is never truly real-time.

Every system — no matter how advanced — has built-in delays. Between a slope moving in the field and a notification reaching your screen, several steps occur: sensors capture, dataloggers collect, gateways aggregate, and platforms process. These layers introduce seconds, minutes, and sometimes longer lags.

Understanding these delays is not a weakness of the system — it is a reality of physics, networks, and computation. And it is a reality that professionals must account for in project planning, risk assessment, and communication.

Where the Delays Occur

  1. Sensor to Datalogger

    • A vibrating wire piezometer or inclinometer probe first measures a parameter.

    • That reading must be transmitted to the datalogger. Depending on frequency and protocol, this may take seconds to minutes.

  2. Datalogger to Gateway (Node to Edge)

    • The datalogger transmits readings to a gateway, often using low-power wireless protocols like LoRa or mesh networks.

    • Networks are not instantaneous. Interference, retries, and duty cycles add latency.

  3. Gateway Aggregation

    • A gateway typically manages dozens or hundreds of nodes. It cycles through them sequentially. This “network scan” introduces another delay before all readings are collected.

  4. Gateway to Platform

    • Data must then travel via cellular, satellite, or wired internet to a central server. Transmission speed depends on connectivity quality.

  5. Platform Processing and Visualization

    • Once in the cloud, raw data is cleaned, time-synced, and stored. Visualization engines process it into dashboards and trigger alerts.

    • Even the slickest platforms require seconds to minutes to ingest, calculate, and display trends.

Put simply: what you see on a “real-time” dashboard always reflects the recent past, not the present moment.

Why This Matters for Professionals

The industry’s obsession with “real-time” risks creating false expectations. If an engineer, regulator, or community stakeholder believes a system is instantaneous, they may assume immediate detection and response is possible for every event.

But geotechnical behavior varies. Many changes — settlement under a structure, pore water pressure shifts in a tailings dam — evolve gradually. In these cases, receiving data at 15-minute or even hourly intervals may be more than sufficient.

By contrast, sudden failures — a rapid slope collapse or structural failure — can progress faster than any monitoring system can detect, transmit, and visualize. Believing in perfect real-time alerts is misleading and dangerous.

When Real-Time Isn’t Necessary

  • Urban Excavations: Settlement typically develops over hours or days. Hourly updates can provide adequate early warning.

  • Mine Tailings: Piezometer trends unfold slowly; a 15–30 minute delay in visualization does not diminish safety, provided thresholds and TARPs (Trigger Action Response Plans) are in place.

  • Bridge Health Monitoring: Strain and vibration data is valuable for trend analysis; true second-by-second feeds are less important than long-term performance tracking.

In these contexts, what matters is not instant data, but clear thresholds, sound interpretation, and defined response actions.

Rethinking Professional Capabilities

The lesson here is not to dismiss monitoring technology, but to elevate professional understanding.

  • Managers and decision-makers must recognize the latency inherent in monitoring systems and set realistic expectations with stakeholders.

  • Engineers must design monitoring regimes that match the rate of change of the parameter being observed, not marketing claims of real-time feeds.

  • Regulators must focus less on instant dashboards and more on robust processes for interpreting and responding to data.

This reflects NEXGROW’s movement: building professionals who are not dazzled by tech buzzwords, but equipped with the judgment to integrate monitoring into broader decision-making.

A Call to Action

Geotechnical monitoring will never be truly real-time. And that’s not a limitation — it’s a call for clarity.

The real skill is not chasing immediacy, but understanding latency, matching data frequency to project risk, and using insights to make better decisions.

Professionals must rethink what “real-time” means: not instantaneous feeds, but timely, reliable, and actionable information. The industry doesn’t need faster dashboards. It needs professionals who can interpret delays, set expectations, and integrate monitoring into strategy.

Because in geotechnical monitoring, the true value isn’t in the sensor — it’s in the professional who knows what to do with the data, however delayed it may be.

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