Sky Specialized, working for the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Culture, launched a pilot project to monitor the structural integrity of 20 buildings in Jeddah’s Al Balad UNESCO World Heritage historic district in 2023. Dustin Partners, the project consultant, selected Inzwa’s VEVA III for the critical first-phase proof of concept that validated the program. Inzwa’s rapid deployment, ability to support external sensors, and customer service were key to the proof of concept’s success.
The Ministry faced a structural monitoring problem at a scale that traditional approaches simply couldn’t address. Al Balad’s buildings are predominantly unreinforced coral-stone masonry with timber diaphragm ties and shallow foundations—pre-code structures with no engineered lateral force-resisting systems, largely undocumented construction details, and building fabric that cannot be drilled, penetrated, or disturbed without causing irreversible damage.
The region’s environment compounded every technical challenge: Jeddah’s coastal humidity accelerates corrosion, summer heat drives differential thermal expansion, and fine dust degrades equipment and connector integrity. Critically, the district sits on karst-prone coralline limestone with fluctuating groundwater—a foundation hazard that acts on all buildings regardless of their visible condition, meaning that even structurally sound-looking buildings could be experiencing slow settlement that wouldn’t produce visible cracking for months or years.
The Ministry needed a solution that was non-invasive, environmentally durable, and capable of establishing a credible baseline quickly—before conditions changed and before adjacent construction activity made attribution of any movement impossible.
In collaboration with Dustin Partners, Inzwa provided a tailored monitoring solution using the VEVA III vibration monitoring system, along with Geokon tiltmeters and crack gauges. On each structure, Dustin installed two VEVA III vibration monitors, eight Geokon tiltmeters, and crack and strain gauges as necessary.
The sensor package was selected to address Al Balad’s two primary failure modes: slow differential settlement driven by karst and groundwater fluctuation, and dynamic demand from construction activity, traffic, and environmental loading.
The VEVA III was chosen for the proof-of-concept phase in part because it enabled rapid deployment. In a complex physical and regulatory environment, the VEVA sensors were the first to stand up and worked every time. The priority in Phase 1 was to get instrumented buildings online quickly, establish data flow, and validate installation methods on coral-stone substrates before scaling. Geokon tiltmeters were paired with crack gauges on existing fissures to distinguish seasonal movement from progressive structural deterioration.
All installation was kept minimally invasive: sensors were surface-mounted on structural masonry only, with no penetration of timber elements, decorative carved stone, or any irreplaceable Hijazi architectural fabric.
The Inzwa Cloud platform provided the remote access and real-time alerting Dustin and the Ministry needed to track conditions across all 20 buildings without requiring site visits for routine data review.
Because each of the 20 buildings had a unique orientation and footprint, tiltmeter readings in local sensor axes were not directly comparable across structures. To make cross-building comparisons meaningful, Dustin and Inzwa together developed a coordinate transformation that rotated each sensor’s pitch and roll data into a shared geographic reference frame using the sensor’s recorded compass bearing at installation and its height above the ground, creating a virtual inclinometer.
The result was a single tilt magnitude and bearing direction for each structure, expressed in the same north-referenced coordinate system used for the Ministry’s ArcGIS asset management environment so that structural behavior could be visualized and compared at the portfolio level without per-building axis conversions. This approach was particularly valuable for detecting torsional movement where a building rotates rather than simply leans—a failure mode that uniaxial tilt data alone would miss.
Standardizing outputs across all 20 structures also enabled a single, consistent set of alert thresholds rather than building-specific manual interpretation of raw sensor values.
The 20-building proof-of-concept deployment achieved its primary objective: it validated the hardware, installation methods, data flow, and software platform under real field conditions in Al Balad’s demanding environment, providing the empirical foundation needed to scale confidently to Phase 2 and beyond. Continuous structural behavior data was captured across all buildings with no installation-related damage to heritage fabric.
Early data demonstrated direct correlations between construction activity and building movement; preliminary records showed that prior to bracing, a building was stable; during the bracing activity, cracks grew and tilt and rotation increased; and once activity stopped, the building stabilized again.
This kind of before-during-after attribution would have been impossible without a prior continuous baseline, underscoring the core value of deploying monitoring before events occur rather than after.
The proof-of-concept phase also demonstrated that the client interface and remote monitoring workflow were operationally viable for the project team, a critical prerequisite for the subsequent program expansion.
Inzwa is now Dustin’s go-to solution for rapid deployment monitoring of critical structures.
