Leading the way in automated monitoring with Kurloo Technology

Monitum’s continued innovation is shaking up the real-time structural and geotechnical monitoring space. Manufacturers’ Monthly spoke with the company’s managing director about the journey of its automated monitoring service – Kurloo Technology.

Years into his career in measurement science as a consulting surveyor, the co- founder and CEO of Kurloo Technology, Lee Hellen, began his first commercial business in 2008. Three years later, Hellen’s team worked on the South Point project in Brisbane, with very heavily constrained tunnels and heritage buildings to deal with. Rather than taking manual measurements with instruments, the team wired the whole site with sensor systems and robotics to measure all the high-risk construction stability items.

“When people are working in deep excavation, they need to make sure the walls are stable and the building isn’t being compromised,” he said. “We took the opportunity to essentially invent a new methodology of how we measure. That project was highly successful and gave birth to a company we called Monitum.”

Monitum gained momentum after the success of this first automation project, expanding their portfolio to work on several large infrastructure projects, across Southeast Queensland.

Most recently, Monitum achieved global industry recognition through its technology for real-time mapping of structural and geotechnical monitoring at the $4B AUD Queens Wharf project where they have been embedded as the principal monitoring consultant to 3 Tier 1 principal building contractors, their high frequency precise spatial data is delivered to the customer through a network of connected IoT sensors and cloud-based technology. The intelligent sensor networks provide accurate and meaningful data in real time, putting the power in the engineer’s hands to make the right decisions.

A strong commitment to ongoing research and development has been crucial to sustaining Monitum’s growth. In 2018, Hellen saw a gap in the market for the use of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) sensors in condition monitoring, with a convergence of new technologies and trends prompting the invention of a revolutionary new surface displacement monitoring device, recently named Kurloo Technology.