United Hub Supports Youth Led Utility Pole Monitoring for Community Resilience

At United Hub, we support young people who apply engineering and technology to practical community needs. We are pleased to support Harry Deng and the Community, Innovation and Engineering Club at Bellevue Christian School as they move a youth-led utility pole monitoring project from an initial prototype toward long-term field testing.

The team has completed the first prototype of an intelligent tilt-monitoring system that uses sensors, long-range communication, and data analysis to track changes in utility pole conditions. After Harry completed two rounds of interviews, United Hub decided to provide $900 in sponsorship for the project's second phase of upgrades and testing. United Hub and the team also plan to deploy a prototype in the Seattle area for long-term field testing.

Harry Deng with the utility pole monitoring prototype

From Storm Damage to an Engineering Idea

The idea was inspired by the bomb cyclone that struck western Washington in November 2024. Combined with an atmospheric river, the storm brought wind gusts of about 70 miles per hour in some areas, toppled large numbers of trees, and caused power outages affecting more than 500,000 customers across the region. Some customers remained without power for several days.

The storm prompted the team to examine the vulnerability of electrical infrastructure during extreme weather. Strong winds, fallen trees, landslides, and ground subsidence can cause utility poles to tilt, deform, or collapse. These failures can affect electricity, communications, road access, and disaster recovery. Manual inspections can also be unsafe during storms, while blocked roads may delay inspections afterward. The team began exploring an automated system that could operate continuously at low cost and with low power consumption.

Youth Leadership and Community Engineering

Harry founded the Community, Innovation and Engineering Club at Bellevue Christian School to bring together students interested in engineering, technology, and community service. He proposed the utility pole monitoring project and led its prototype development, testing plan, team responsibilities, and external partnerships.

Club members contributed according to their interests and skills. Their work included business plan development, community outreach, project presentations, algorithm research, sensor selection, hardware assembly, software interface development, experimental design, and testing.

Building and Testing the Monitoring Device

The prototype continuously monitors changes in a utility pole's position. It records tilt and movement, processes data on the device, and transmits results over long distances. The team is also testing battery and solar power as possible ways to support long-term, low-power operation.

In preliminary experiments, the team mounted a smartphone on the same test platform and used its sensors as a reference. The team compared readings across several angle ranges. The prototype detected changes within the tested range in 20 seconds, with an overall error of approximately +/-3 degrees, and remained stable under the conditions tested.

Prototype hardware and tilt sensor testing

Connecting Hardware and Software

While developing the prototype, Harry found that sensors often use different data structures, units, time formats, and communication methods. Building a separate processing system for every new sensor would make the project difficult to expand. He therefore independently designed a general-purpose AI agent with configurable data interfaces. The system is intended to receive data from different sensors, standardize the information, identify changes or anomalies, and organize the results into summaries, charts, or alerts.

The utility pole prototype collects field data, while the AI agent provides a more flexible way to process it. Long-term testing will give both systems continuous data from real-world environments. With further development and validation, the architecture could be explored for standing-water detection, air-quality monitoring, and other sensor-based applications. These remain future research directions.

Sensor data dashboard and AI agent interface

United Hub Support and the Next Phase

Harry first connected with United Hub through the City of Bellevue during the project's early stage about a year ago. After the first prototype was completed, he presented the project's goals, technical design, testing plan, budget needs, and potential community value to United Hub.

United Hub's $900 sponsorship will support sensor upgrades and improvements to the project's data-analysis capabilities. During long-term field testing, the team plans to evaluate the stability of data collection and transmission in different weather conditions, document missing data, measurement drift, and maintenance needs, and use the findings to improve the next prototype.

After field deployment, the club plans to collect and analyze long-term data, evaluate the stability of the sensors, power supply, and data transmission, and reduce inaccurate readings and data interruptions. The team will use the results to guide the next prototype and hopes to receive feedback from professionals in engineering, public safety, and emergency management.

By supporting this project, United Hub is helping a student-led team test its work in a real environment and learn what is required to move from a prototype to a dependable community application. We look forward to sharing updates from the field-testing phase.