ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / While any vehicle that is typically part of a flight test campaign is heavily instrumented to validate its performance, long term vehicle health monitoring is performed by a significantly reduced number of sensors due to a number of issues including cost, weight and maintainability. The development and deployment of smart sensor buses has reached a time in which they can be integrated into a larger data acquisition system environment. The benefits of these types of buses include a significant reduction in the amount of wiring and overall system complexity by placing the appropriate signal conditioners close to their respective sensors and providing data back over a common bus, that also provides a single power source. The use of a smart-sensor data collection bus, such as IntelliBus™1 or IEEE-1451, along with the continued miniaturization of signal conditioning devices, leads to the interesting possibility of permanently embedding data collection capabilities within a vehicle after the initial flight test effort has completed, providing long-term health-monitoring and diagnostic functionality that is not available today. This paper will discuss the system considerations and the benefits of a smart sensor based system and how pieces can be transitioned from flight qualification to long-term vehicle health monitoring in production vehicles.