The suspension sensors in your car could be used to predict landslides before they actually happen.
March 24, 2026
Original Paper
Crowdsourced road pavement roughness as a proxy for landslide-induced degradation: evidence from Campania region, South Italy
SSRN · 6459833
The Takeaway
By monitoring 'road roughness' data from everyday vehicles, researchers can detect the tiny, early-stage ground shifts that precede major landslides. It turns the global fleet of civilian cars into a massive, low-cost early warning system for infrastructure collapse.
From the abstract
Monitoring landslide impacts on transport infrastructure is challenging at regional scale, particularly in mountainous areas where roads represent critical lifelines for communities and emergency services. Conventional approaches for assessing pavement damage in landslide-prone areas, including visual inspections, terrestrial or mobile LiDAR, and UAV photogrammetry, provide detailed information but are limited in spatial coverage, resource-intensive, and rarely applicable over extended road netw