Given a body undergoing a stress-strain status as consequence of external excitations, sensors can be deployed on the accessible lateral surface of the body. The sensor readings are regarded as input of a numerical model of reduced order (i.e., the number of sensors is lower than the number of the state variables the full model would require). The goal is to locate the sensors in such a way to minimize the deviations from the response of the true (full) model. One adopts either accelerometers as sensors or devices reading relative displacements. Two applications are studied: a plane frame is first investigated; the focus is eventually on a 3D body.