Low Cost Intelligent Wireless Vibration System Progresses

As part of the Innovate UK fund, over the past 2 years RMS have been involved in an ‘Intelligent Wireless Vibration System’ collaboration between the Building Research Establishment (BRE), Cybula, Griffiths Associates and Skanska. The project called REAM (Enabling remote built environment asset management using embedded intelligence) is tasked with enabling low-cost embedded intelligence within the Facilities Management (FM) market.

This is done by optimising Artificial Intelligence (A.I) technologies for use in detecting the pre-cursors of fault conditions arising on rotating plant. The landmark achievement of the project was during the pilot studies run at St. Barts Hospital and British Sugar where the system was capable of learning the behavior of the plant and successfully detecting anomalies in their condition. All completed on single board computing systems with no cloud server for computing power. Interestingly the system is capable of communicating over long distances with Wifi and other radio technologies but can take care of all its computing on the CPUs next to the machines.

The natural progression for this technology is certainly for use in the built environment enabling low cost condition monitoring using a variety of technologies. With that in mind the Innovate UK fund encourages projects such as this to seek commercial viability and opportunities, as such the pre-production prototype versions of the commercial system are now being trialed as manufacturing preparations are made.

The condition monitoring analytics, which have been developed in high integrity applications (such as nuclear, transport, and energy) for rapid and easily configurable abnormality detection of failure modes can also be run on more highly critical machines utilising more traditional data collection types. Firstly though, Skanska feel the future of Facilities Management (FM) is the use of multiple data sources through intelligent condition monitoring to enable more effective and efficient asset management.

The future of the project looks bright as it becomes a commercial product capable of increasing asset life, maximising efficiency, reducing risk of unexpected failures and reducing energy usage. The REAM project was nominated as a finalist for the “Best Asset Management Innovation” at the Building Innovation Awards.

Interested to know more about this exciting technology? Contact us to schedule a call on +44 (0)1206 791917 or via email to: info (at) rms-reliability.com.

UPDATE May 2022: Learn more about how this project became a reality: introducting the Kappa X Wireless Vibration Sensor.

Last updated: 18th April 2026