NHR is highlighting a rail infrastructure monitoring application in Taiwan, helping a maintenance team detect abnormal ground movement at a tunnel portal earlier and act before slope instability escalates into service disruption risk.
Closing the gap between inspections
Tunnel portals and slopes along a railway absorb years of rainfall, weathering, and seismic activity, and slope failure typically begins as slow displacement invisible to the naked eye. The team had managed conditions through periodic inspection, leaving a monitoring gap between visits: after a typhoon downpour or an earthquake, whether the slope had shifted could only be answered once someone reached the site. The NHR solution places smart tilt sensors on the slopes and retaining structures around the portal, continuously tracking subtle inclination and attitude changes. Data returns over NB-IoT — no cabling or mains power at the mountainside points — and the deployment runs unattended for the long term. The platform accumulates tilt trends for every point against multi-level alert thresholds, raising tiered alerts that send the team to confirm and respond on site.
Minute-level alerts, lighter inspection load
After deployment, awareness of abnormal ground movement shrank from after-the-fact discovery to minute-level alerts, letting the team intervene before instability threatens train service. Routine manual inspection rounds fell by roughly a third to a half, concentrating manpower on alerted points and high-risk sections, and key points gained a continuous tilt record for the first time — a long-term data foundation for slope risk assessment and remediation decisions.