Abstract: The development of damage detection methods and safety monitoring technology of bridge are analyzed and summarized, and the existing methods are classified. The five major challenges and problems of the current existing methods in the application and research are also analyzed. Some hot research issuesdeveloped recently are further discussed. Then, some suggestions and the direction of the next research work are put forward, and the idea that using big data method to deal with bridge safety monitoring is also put forward, hoping that these ideas can inspire the researchers in the future research work.