It’s a nice technique that can be applied to existing telemetry [remote sensing] datasets,” says David Shipworth of University College London. But the differences in function may become less distinct as the units age, he says. “The barrier between normal and faulty operation will become more and more blurred.

As the cost of sensors continues to fall, Shipworth says there will be more systems like this on the market. “We’ll see a whole bunch of different machine learning approaches thrown at this over the next few years,” he says.