Aviation safety systems have undergone dramatic changes over the past fifty years. If you take a look at the early technology in this area, you'll see that there was a lot of work done in the area of so-called 'built-in-testing' (BIT) which essentially tests connectivity between different components.

Technology has moved forward very far since that time. With the massive storage systems and advanced sensors and other communications systems, we are now able to capture and store vast quantities of health and control related data. This data is usually stored off-line for future analysis. In many cases, we also have an abundance of human-written text reports that relate to known safety issues. A key problem is to 'look' across all these data sources in order to find precursors to safety events. Although humans do look at many aspects of the data, it is difficult, if not impossible for them to integrate all the information available in a meaningful way.

Other industries face this glut of data in their own way. Businesses have invested heavily in business intelligence products based on data mining that are designed to convert data into actionable information to maximize their profits or other metrics. The IVHM project is investing in data mining technologies to help sift through these massive data sets to uncover actionable information from a safety perspective. I've attached a presentation that Irv Statler and I gave at NASA HQ on this subject during an Aeronautics Technical Seminar. A video of the talk is also included. It's about 90 minutes long, so grab some popcorn. :)