Environment and Usage Monitoringof Electronic Products for Health Assessment and Product Design

The life-cycle environmental and usage conditions of a product or system can be monitored and analyzed to assess its on-going health, provide advance warning of failure, and provide information to improve the design and qualification of fielded and future products. The challenge lies in the implementation of this method in application conditions. This paper presents methods to effectively collect and analyze life-cycle environmental and usage data for in-situ health assessments. An integrated hardware-software micro-programmable module for health and usage monitoring of electronic products in their application environment is presented. The hardware incorporates local sensors, and on-board processing power using embedded software. These data processing capabilities are intended to enable immediate and localized processing of the raw sensor data to reduce the power and memory consumption anticipated during load monitoring. Guidelines are also provided to develop a life cycle monitoring plan, that encompasses the selection of environmental and usage parameters. A case study is presented to illustrate the methodology.