Combining Sensor Data for Comprehensive Monitoring: Leica GeoMoS’ AnyData Import

Authors: Dr Lidija Špiranec, Megan Hansen

Understanding movements in complex environments, like construction sites, mines, dams, railways, and landslide-prone areas, often necessitates the use of varied sensors to capture robust and multi-faceted data. While more data enables greater insights into movements, it also means monitoring service providers must find a way to quickly and securely transfer, process, cross-analyse, and visualise large amounts of data.

Leica GeoMoS monitoring software with the AnyData Import feature makes it easy to combine data from different sensors and offers a range of advanced but user-friendly options for viewing and understanding your data – delivering a comprehensive overview of monitored sites that can be shared with others.

In this expert insight, we cover the need for multi-sensor monitoring, the challenges often faced when combining sensor data, and the Leica GeoMoS solution. Additionally, we will walk you through this workflow using a practical railway monitoring scenario to show the lynchpin role of AnyData Import for successful hybrid monitoring projects.

The benefits of multi-sensor monitoring

Each monitoring case is unique, and often the best way to gain a comprehensive understanding of movements is by using multiple sensor types to capture an array of data. Multi-sensor, or hybrid, monitoring brings many benefits to complex projects. 

For example, imagine a section of railway that emerges from a tunnel and runs along an embankment buttressed by a retaining wall. With structural, slope, and rail stability at stake, monitoring this portion of the track requires data about many elements - tunnel, track and supporting elements, wall, and sloped earth. 

Installing a range of geodetic, geotechnical, and other sensors in this case will yield more complete data giving the whole picture of movements in the area, along with data redundancy. To effectively analyse stability above and below ground with an in-depth data set, monitoring specialists can use a range of techniques, including total stations measuring prisms, tilt, distance other geotechnical sensors, laser scanning, and imaging. This combination of sensors can more fully represent the deformation and enables data diversity and redundancy, ensuring monitoring information is available even if one technology fails or produces erroneous results. 

Across industries and projects, the range of sensors needed to achieve comprehensive data acquisition increases with the size of the monitored area. For example, landslides and open pit mines often require the broadest spectrum of monitoring technologies to cover several square kilometres with high density. Line structures like rails or tunnels combine 3D information provided by geodetic monitoring with relative movement information from geotechnical sensors. Construction sites require information about water level and ground movements, as well as the movements of surrounding buildings and structures. 

No matter the industry or project, multi-sensor measurement methods make it possible to collect the right data in the right places. 

Data import and aggregation challenges

While more data can ultimately mean more comprehensive insights into movements - providing the information stakeholders need to make timely decisions and keep people safe - the process from measurement to analysis is not without challenges. 

As monitoring service providers well know, sensors from different manufacturers have different interfaces – from file types to storage options, making it difficult to get an overview of results. If you must visualise, alert, and report separately for each sensor type, the process becomes overly complicated, diminishing the powerful potential of a clear understanding of all results within a hybrid monitoring approach.

Therefore, to efficiently operate multi-sensor solutions, monitoring professionals need software that is open to different data files and flexible with import options, from manual transfer to automated import over intelligent API integrations. Once all the data is together, it needs to be processed as one data set and easily visualised so that monitoring service providers and stakeholders alike can easily navigate and understand the results.

Leica GeoMoS deformation monitoring software with the AnyData Import feature offers a solution to this set of challenges.

Leica GeoMoS and the AnyData Import feature

Whether for campaign or fully automated monitoring and from one sensor to a large fleet, Leica GeoMoS is an advanced monitoring software solution easily tailored to specific project needs and preferences. GeoMoS ensures secure access to monitoring data from any monitoring sensor, whether from Leica Geosystems or a third-party provider. In addition to data aggregation and storage, GeoMoS empowers full project management with sensor control, data analysis and visualisations, notifications, and reporting. 

The GeoMoS AnyData Import feature is a key part of this solution enabling centralised data collection and storage from third-party inputs, including environmental and geotechnical sensors, photos, and geographical and radar data. Supporting any file type such as PNG, JPEG, CSV, XML, JSON, ASCII, shapefile, and others through open integration of physical files or via API, sourced locally or in the cloud, GeoMoS collects and combines all relevant data into the assigned monitoring project for immediate access. When using WiSen wireless geotechnical sensor systems with GeoMoS, configuration, automation, and data integration of tilt meter, crack gauge, and other sensors is even more streamlined.         

Supplementing and complementing the measurements collected with Leica Geosystems geodetic sensors, GeoMoS compares all the latest sensor data against reference values or, in advanced cases, uses the data as input for further calculations. If deformations are detected, GeoMoS instantly delivers notifications to stakeholders reporting exceeded tolerances so they can make timely interventions. 

GeoMoS also provides a range of ways to visualise and interact with project data. For example, monitoring service providers can use Leica GeoMoS Now! installed inside a closed network or connect to the cloud via browser to view results anytime and anywhere, visualised through dynamic graphs or a map view. The map view is far more than a static representation – each sensor appears as an icon on the site, and, with a quick click, users can bring up individual sensor status and data in graph or numerical form. 

GeoMoS also enables customised and fully automated reporting, making it easy to share the content with multiple stakeholders at regular intervals.

Railway monitoring: A practical workflow with GeoMoS AnyData

What does the GeoMoS workflow with AnyData look like in practice? Let’s return to the railway monitoring example from earlier where we needed to determine structural, track, and slope stability all in one site. 

>> Discover how Leica Geosystems' railway monitoring solutions can elevate the safety and efficiency of rail operations. Download our Railway Monitoring White Paper.

To monitor the potentially landslide prone embankment running along the track, we use a Leica MS60 MultiStation laser scanning total station, tilt sensors, an in-place inclinometer, and a water level gauge. With the MS60’s laser scanning function, we take patch scans of the slope, capturing thousands of points per second for comparisons against a control scan. Wireless tilt sensors anchored in the ground record changes to the earth’s tilt along the slope, which, together with the inclinometer and water level sensor, help us understand more about what is happening inside the slope.

The MS60’s robotic total station automatically takes high-precision 3D prism measurements of the retaining wall, providing accurate XYZ positioning that enables a structural deformation analysis. Beside the prisms, we install tilt and distance sensors to understand how the wall is leaning and if its distance to another object or the ground is changing. With imaging capabilities, we also benefit from pictures of the site we can use for visual inspections. 

Wireless distance meters are mounted on the tunnel walls in profiles, measuring geometry distortions like tunnel convergence, ovalisation, and displacements. Prisms along the track allow us to monitor track geometry, with tilt sensors in the middle for even more information. Altogether, we have a robust and in-depth data set to effectively analyse area movements.

Since we are using GeoMoS as our core monitoring software, the AnyData Import feature means all sensor measurements are automatically collected and added to our project. Collected in one place, our data is ready for analysis according to project parameters, cross validation, and alerting. With GeoMoS Now!, we can see this data on our mobile device, bringing up the map view for an overview or dive into specific device readings to understand results in more detail. 

When it’s time to report all these findings to our stakeholders, our work has already been done since we set up automated reporting at the beginning of the project. Assigned recipients receive a weekly report with images and graphs that help them easily visualise site movements. As a bonus, GeoMoS lets us customise the reports with our own company logos, so our reporting stays consistently on-brand. 

From raw data to comprehensive insights

For multi-sensor monitoring, Leica GeoMoS presents an effective solution for secure data aggregation, clear visualisations, and automated reporting. Integrating data from a diverse set of sensors alongside Leica Geosystems geodetic instruments makes GeoMoS an asset for monitoring service providers tasked with assessing the stability of structures and slopes across industries. 

By supporting data from all third-party sensors, the AnyData Import feature ensures more effective data collection in monitoring schemes - important to GeoMoS’ centralised data integration that turns raw data into comprehensive insights.