Synchronous movement of attached self-lifting scaffolds is traditionally monitored with wired sensors in high-rise building construction, which limits their flexibility of movements. A ZigBee-based wireless sensor system has been suggested in this article to prove the effectiveness of wireless sensor networks in actual implementation. Two optoelectronic sensors are integrated into a ZigBee node for measuring the displacement of attached self-lifting scaffolds. The proposed wireless sensor network combines an end device and a coordinator to allow easy replacement of sensors as compared to a wired network. A wake-up timer algorithm is proposed to reduce the transmitting power during continuous wireless data communication in the wireless sensor network. Furthermore, a variant binary exponential backoff transmission algorithm for data loss avoidance is proposed. The variant binary exponential backoff algorithm reduces packet collisions during simultaneous access by increasing the randomizing moments at nodes attempting to access the wireless channels. The performance of three of the proposed modules—a cable sensor, a 315-MHz sensor, and a ZigBee sensor—is evaluated in terms of packet delivery ratio and the end-to-end delay of a ZigBee-based wireless sensor network. The experimental results show that the proposed variant binary exponential backoff transmission algorithm achieves a higher packet delivery ratio at the cost of higher delays. The average cost of the developed ZigBee-based wireless sensor network decreased by 24% compared with the cable sensor. The power consumption of ZigBee is approximately 53.75% of the 315-MHz sensor. The average current consumption is reduced by approximately 1.5 mA with the wake-up timer algorithm at the same sampling rate.