MotionMonitor

MotionMonitor is Geospatial Insight's satellite-based ground movement monitoring service. It is powered by APSIS (Advanced Pixel System using Intermittent SBAS, or ISBAS), an InSAR algorithm developed by Terra Motion and the University of Nottingham, and it processes Sentinel-1 radar data to measure millimetre-level surface displacement. Compared with traditional InSAR techniques, APSIS gives up to 2–8× higher measurement density in urban areas and 7–15× in vegetated or complex terrain. It works across all surface types, including vegetated slopes and earth dams, without corner reflectors or other ground instruments.

Key capabilities:

• Full-terrain InSAR (APSIS): Near-complete coverage over urban, natural and vegetated surfaces, where conventional InSAR is limited to hard targets or needs corner reflectors.
• Time-series visualisation: Colour-coded displacement points that open into displacement graphs with short- and long-term moving averages, plus a to-scale surface subsidence raster layer.
• Inverse velocity analysis: Used to estimate potential failure dates and give early warning of instability.
• Hosted dashboard: A cloud-based dashboard that holds multiple sites worldwide in one place, with optional client layers such as drone or ground imagery.
• Tailings dam monitoring: MotionMonitor launched in April 2021 as MotionMonitor-TSF, for mine tailings storage facilities. A University of Nottingham and Durham University study found that APSIS analysis could have predicted the 2019 Brumadinho dam collapse about 40 days in advance, to within a week.

MotionMonitor is aimed at construction, critical infrastructure and mining. It supports early risk identification, proactive risk assessment and validation of design assumptions across the project lifecycle, and it removes the need for ground instruments, which cuts monitoring costs.