Some of the general attributes of SHM as noted from literature are listed below"

• SHM is the whole process of the design, development and implementation of techniques for the detection, localization and estimation of damages for monitoring the integrity of structures and machines.
• Since the manual inspection and maintenance scheduling procedures are time consuming, costly, prone to error and insensitive to small variations in structural health, there is an urgent economic and technological need to deploy SHM systems for seamless evaluation of structural integrity and reliability.
• SHM offers a shift from schedule driven maintenance to condition based maintenance / predictive maintenance of structures.
• The concept of SHM is a technology that automatically monitors structural conditions from sensor information in real time by equipping sensor network and diagnosis algorithms into structures.
• The key requirements of a health monitoring system are that it should be able to detect damaging events, characterize the nature, extent and seriousness of the damage and respond intelligently within a reasonable time period to mitigate the ill effect of the damage or to repair the damage.