Development of a Scheme of Sensors for Recording Soil-Movement Profiles in Landslide-Prone Regions in the Himalayas

Fatalities due to landslides have been a major concern in the Himalayan region, where slopes are trimmed and altered for construction to improve the infrastructure, deforestation, and plenty of other human activities, further triggered by rainfall, earthquakes, and geological reasons. A real-time monitoring and early warning system can reduce the risk of landslides. The suitability of the monitoring scheme and associated parameters, the scale of monitoring, and the intensity of data generated are crucial for reducing false alarms. The key requirement to achieve this is to develop a scheme for selecting displacement parameters (displacement, velocity, acceleration) and associated sensing schemes (accelerometer, imaging, extensometer) used in landslide monitoring. A step before this, the monitoring measures need to be validated as per the sensing system and the associated calibration method (in laboratory scale). Hence, this paper focuses on a selection of methods to calibrate these systems and a scheme for thresholding these measures. However, the efficiency of micro-electromechanical system (MEMS)-based sensors for monitoring soil movement has been demonstrated.