This thesis discusses the development of a low-power embedded system capable of performing real-time structural crack detection with acoustic emissions. Firstly, a panoramic analysis of structural health monitoring and acoustic emissions is given, highlighting the most important notions to understand the field. Alongside this study, the crucial and necessary civil engineering, and electronic concepts and components employed in this work are introduced. Building on this foundation the thesis embellishes the most transformative and decisive proceedings in the structural health monitoring field to understand the current state of the art, the most interesting areas of research, and future directions. Thereafter, a detailed description of the embedded solution's evolution is given, showcasing the hardware development's caveats, and the solutions for sampling the acoustic emission signal.