NHR is sharing a roadside tree-monitoring application in Taiwan, where M20 smart tilt sensors record long-term changes in tree posture and help the road authority catch early warning signs before a tree comes down.
Making invisible structural risk visible
Taiwan faces typhoons and monsoon downpours every year, and fallen street trees can crush vehicles or block lanes. The hard part is that a tree weakened by root decay or loosened soil often looks normal — by the time tilt is visible to the eye, the tree is usually close to failure. With a large tree inventory, manual inspection could neither cover every corridor nor quantify how much each tree had moved.
M20 sensors were mounted on trunks along high-risk corridors, continuously measuring posture across three axes to capture subtle tilt and displacement. The devices report wirelessly over NB-IoT or LoRaWAN and run on long-life batteries, fitting large-scale outdoor deployment. A geographic dashboard presents each tree's tilt trend and alerts the maintenance unit the moment a safety threshold is exceeded.
Acting before the tree falls
Awareness of tree risk has shifted from passive reporting to real-time system alerts. During typhoons and heavy rain, the authority can immediately identify which trees need attention first and brace, prune, or remove them in advance — moving the public-safety line clearly forward.
Tree posture also forms a complete, analyzable record for the first time: trees accumulating lean after storms and corridors carrying higher risk can be compared against long-term data, so limited maintenance capacity is allocated by risk level.