This paper presents an approach for selecting precursor parameters for health monitoring of electronic products. The approach includes failure modes, mechanisms, and effects analysis (FMMEA) and life cycle profile analysis of a product. The criticality of the failure mechanisms is established using a risk priority number (RPN), where the RPN for each failure mechanism is calculated as a product of the occurrence and the severity of each mechanism. Performance parameters that can be associated with the critical failure mechanisms should be selected for health monitoring of the product. These parameters could be used for diagnostic purposes. A case study is presented to demonstrate the parameter selection approach for a computer server system. FMMEA was performed on the server, and precursor parameters of the server were selected for monitoring based on the failure modes and mechanisms that posed the highest risk. The utilization of identified parameters for fault detection is presented through a diagnostic algorithm. This approach can be used to select parameters for health monitoring of any system.

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