There are plenty of options when it comes to healing one's own body, but patching up one's house usually requires days of back-breaking labor and lots of cash to spend.

The Japanese approach is excellent: they are researching new materials for decades, and the best proof is an earthquake of magnitude 6.9 that has struck off the seacoast of central Japan's Hokuriku region, about 225 miles northwest of Tokyo on Sunday morning killing just one person and injuring around 250 more.

You don't want to see the effects such an earthquake would have on less developed countries...

Another approach is that of the University of Leeds' NanoManufacturing Institute (NMI), that helped design a high-tech villa that should resist earthquakes by "self-healing" cracks in its own walls and monitoring vibrations through an intelligent sensor network that is to be built on a Greek mountainside.

The £9.5 million European Union-funded project has developed special walls for the house that contain nano polymer particles that will turn into a liquid when squeezed under pressure, flow into the cracks, and then harden to form a solid material.

The house walls will be built from novel load bearing steel frames and high-strength gypsum board. But they will be unique for another reason too: they'll contain wireless, battery-less sensors and Leeds-designed radio frequency identity tags that collect vast amounts of data about the building over time, such as any stresses and vibrations, temperature, humidity and gas levels.

"What we're trying to achieve here is very exciting; we're looking to use polymers in much tougher situations than ever before on a larger scale", said NMI Chief Executive Professor Terry Wilkins.

The project involves state of the art technological features as well as expertise in designing wireless networks for extreme environments and hard-to-access places, proof being the fact that even if the building totally collapsed, the sensors would still let you pinpoint the source of the fault.

The possible applications could mean taller and safer buildings, as well as the ability to erect stable structures in some of the most unfriendly environments on Earth.