Industrial Sensing & PHM

What we keep being asked

Operations leaders want machines that predict their own failures. The obstacle is data volume: vibration streams are far too heavy to ship anywhere, so the analysis has to happen where the signal is measured.

Fig. 2Sensor taps on a pump feed a near-sensor chip beside the machine.

Fig. 3The chip is the filter: kHz of raw vibration in, one clean health signal out.

What it is

Rotating and powered equipment emits its condition continuously: vibration spectra, acoustic signatures, motor current, temperature. Prognostics and health management turns those streams into a health index, fault alarms, and remaining-useful-life estimates. The data problem is locality — a single vibration channel at tens of kHz is too much to stream, so the feature extraction and the anomaly model belong at the sensor. That is the same “transmit results, not raw data” architecture we already build for vision.

Why now

The predictive maintenance market is projected to grow from $13.9B in 2026 to $23.8B by 2031, an 11.4% CAGR^[11], with PHM systems growing at a similar rate and sensors holding the largest share of the monitoring stack^[12]. On the model side, time-series foundation models such as TimesFM and Chronos now give strong anomaly detection on standard bearing and plant datasets^[13][14], and compact distilled versions of them are credible candidates for edge deployment.

What UXF brings

This extends our existing Bio and Sensor Domains capability from biology to the factory floor. We co-design the sensing chain — which signals, which features, which compact model, and what it costs in energy — with measured numbers on your own machines. It also connects to our domain-specific SLMs: a compact model can turn PHM outputs into maintenance reports in the operator’s language.

Early stage: pilot instrumentation studies

How we engage

First engagements are pilot instrumentation and co-design studies on a customer’s equipment: instrument a representative machine, establish a baseline, and report what the always-on detector costs in milliwatts. Request a briefing to scope a pilot.