Digitalisation is rewriting the rules of calibration: more accurate sensors cut costs, save energy and keep products safe

“Every single measurement out there is incorrect by default. It's just a matter of how much. That's what calibration defines. There's always some uncertainty, and how well we understand that uncertainty is the whole point,” says Sami Koskinen, Director of Digital Transformation at Beamex. 

For decades, the answer came from taking instruments out of service, one at a time, and comparing them against a reference in a laboratory. That world is changing fast, and two developments explain why: sensor network metrology and the digital calibration certificate, or DCC.

Senior Scientist Shahin Tabandeh from VTT MIKES puts the wider purpose of his field in similar terms.

“We try to bring trustworthiness and accuracy to all measurements around the world, and make sure that physics speaks the same language everywhere,” Tabandeh says.

Increasingly, sensors work as part of much larger, interconnected systems. 

“A forest is an ecosystem, not only a collection of trees,” Tabandeh says. “A sensor network works the same way: many sensors together form one distributed measuring instrument, and its reliability depends not only on the quality of the individual sensors, but also on their locations, their communication, their calibration history and the quality of the data they produce.”

Reframing has practical consequences. Instead of inspecting every sensor on a fixed schedule, whether it needs it or not, it becomes possible to look at how a whole network of sensors behaves together, and to spot the ones that start drifting out of line.

“Now we have the opportunity to see how data collected from sensors in a network agree with each other. When something changes, the system sends what we could call a Digital Calibration Request (DCR). That saves a lot of money, because when a sensor is doing well, its calibration interval may potentially be extended, or the sensor may be deprioritised in favour of instruments showing signs of drift. The applicable regulatory and quality requirements must, of course, still be met.” Tabandeh explains.

Turning that idea into working methods was the job of FunSNM (Fundamental principles of Sensor Network Metrology), a European research project funded through the European Partnership on Metrology under Horizon Europe.

VTT coordinated the three-year project, which brought together 19 institutes, universities and industry partners from across Europe and concluded at the end of August 2026.

“We developed a common metrological foundation and toolbox for assessing distributed sensor networks,” Tabandeh says.

“That covers uncertainty propagation, the treatment of correlations, data quality metrics, self- and co-calibration of sensors, sensor fusion, drift estimation and sensor health monitoring. We also developed software frameworks supporting machine-readable data, semantic interoperability and the use of ontologies.”
The project tested its methods in five real-world settings: district heating, air quality monitoring, gas distribution networks, advanced manufacturing and smart buildings.

For a pharmaceutical company running hundreds of thousands of calibrations a year across multiple sites, Tabandeh notes, even a modest reduction in unnecessary calibrations, made possible by better monitoring of sensor health, adds up to a substantial saving.

Today, most calibration results are still delivered on paper, or as a scanned copy of it. A German laboratory and a Japanese laboratory may calibrate the same type of instrument in much the same way, but the certificates they produce can differ in language, layout and terminology, making it hard for one system to understand the other automatically.

The digital calibration certificate aims to close that gap. 

“A digital calibration certificate is a format everyone can read,” Koskinen says. “The certificate looks the same everywhere, and it allows machine-to-machine communication without misinterpretation. That's a huge project, and both VTT and Beamex are part of developing that standard and bringing the voice of industry to it.”

According to Koskinen, adoption is already happening, but at a modest scale. A European consortium spanning pharmaceutical companies, instrument manufacturers and calibration providers, Beamex among them, is working towards full production use of DCC in 2027. 

“It's a bit like the old format wars in video recording,” Koskinen says. “But this time I think we have a real chance of a breakthrough. It's being developed together with industry all around the globe – China is on board, Europe is on board, the United States is on board.”

Finnish expertise has also helped shape the standard itself. “We've been able to influence the development of the standard from Finland, together with Finnish subject matter experts and industrial partners,” Koskinen adds.

Better measurement shows its value in places most people never think about.

“Energy is an obvious starting point. Wind turbines rely on sensors to adjust blade angle in response to changing wind conditions, and hydraulic pressure needs to be measured precisely to make that adjustment correctly”, Koskinen says.

District heating offers a less obvious but financially significant case: with more accurate temperature measurement, operators can run networks closer to the minimum safe threshold instead of keeping a wide safety margin, cutting heat losses and costs.

However, several open questions remain.

“Storing every reading from millions of sensors in the cloud is not sustainable”, Tabandeh points out. “Processing data locally, at the edge, and sending only the useful, reduced results onward   can reduce energy use compared with sending everything to central servers.”

Cybersecurity is a newer concern for a field that has traditionally focused on laboratory precision rather than digital defences.

“Whenever information is digitalised and connected to other systems, it may become more exposed to unauthorised access or misuse unless appropriate safeguards are in place,” Koskinen says.

There is also a genuinely open question about who owns the data a digital calibration certificate makes shareable, and how willing companies are to share it. 

“Are companies ready to democratise the data?” Koskinen asks. “Companies struggle with that. It's their data, and they don't always know how sharing it affects their intellectual property.”

Improved data quality is what makes the difference. 

“The ultimate goal is trustworthiness and quality of the data,” Tabandeh says. “DCC is only the enabler, because it makes things machine-readable. The main thing is that digitalisation is bringing new opportunities, and VTT and Beamex are working together to give Finnish and global customers the chance to bring real data quality to their measurements.”

Koskinen agrees. “We are both in the trust business. If we can eliminate as much human and computer error as possible and improve data quality, metrology gets better, and consumers are always the winners.”