Understanding how engineering structures respond to loads and their environment is of paramount importance for their successful design and reliable operation. Analyzing the strains, stresses, temperatures, and deflections in a bridge during rush hour, a composite aircraft’s wing spar during a storm, or a high-end bicycle during the Tour de France is what allows engineers to predict a structure’s lifetime, increase its safety, and optimize its performance. Armed with a complete picture of these quantities from the early design stages to the end of a product’s lifecycle, designers would undoubtedly create safer, stronger, and more efficient engineering structures. Now there is a distributed sensing platform capable of providing this information in real time, monitoring strains, temperatures, stresses, out of plane deflections, and three dimensional shape using a small and lightweight package