This paper presents the design and evaluation of Wisden, a wireless sensor network system for structural data acquisition. Wisden is a first-generation wireless structural monitoring system that continuously collects structural response data from a multi-hop network of sensor nodes and displays and stores the data at a base station. The system incorporates three novel software components: reliable data transport, compression, and data synchronization. Wisden uses a vibration card specifically designed for high-quality vibration sensing and is implemented on Mica-2 motes. The system uses a hybrid error recovery scheme for reliable data transport, a simple run-length encoding scheme for compression, and a data synchronization scheme that requires little overhead. The system is evaluated through experiments on the motes and a small deployment on a real structure. The results show that Wisden can reliably transmit data from tens of nodes with a high sampling rate, and that the system can compress data to reduce the data rate requirements and improve latency. The system is also evaluated for its performance in terms of compression gain and data acquisition latency. The results indicate that Wisden can achieve a significant reduction in data size with very low RMS error, making it a promising solution for structural monitoring applications.This paper presents the design and evaluation of Wisden, a wireless sensor network system for structural data acquisition. Wisden is a first-generation wireless structural monitoring system that continuously collects structural response data from a multi-hop network of sensor nodes and displays and stores the data at a base station. The system incorporates three novel software components: reliable data transport, compression, and data synchronization. Wisden uses a vibration card specifically designed for high-quality vibration sensing and is implemented on Mica-2 motes. The system uses a hybrid error recovery scheme for reliable data transport, a simple run-length encoding scheme for compression, and a data synchronization scheme that requires little overhead. The system is evaluated through experiments on the motes and a small deployment on a real structure. The results show that Wisden can reliably transmit data from tens of nodes with a high sampling rate, and that the system can compress data to reduce the data rate requirements and improve latency. The system is also evaluated for its performance in terms of compression gain and data acquisition latency. The results indicate that Wisden can achieve a significant reduction in data size with very low RMS error, making it a promising solution for structural monitoring applications.