There’s a moment that most reliability professionals know well. You have the data. You have the spectrum. You know something is wrong. But when you go to operations to authorize a repair, the conversation stalls. They don’t speak vibration. They don’t read FFTs. And without a way to show them—really show them—what’s happening inside that machine, the work order stays open.
It’s not a data problem. It’s a communication problem. And it’s one we’ve been determined to solve.
The Idea That Started It All
Our Technical Product Owner, Joe Duncan, spent years visiting pilot customers as a Technical Service Representative, including a lot of time in automotive facilities where vibration analysis was a foreign concept to most of the decision-makers. He would fly out to customer sites, capture motion amplification footage with a specialty camera, play it back for operations and management, and watch problems that had been open for months get resolved within weeks.
Not because the data changed. Because people finally saw it.
That experience stuck with him. And it raised a question: what if you didn’t need a $30,000 camera to create that moment?
What We Built
Motion Insights is KCF’s mobile-first Visual Vibration Technology, built natively into the SMARTdiagnostics platform. Using the camera on your smartphone, it amplifies subtle mechanical motion that is invisible to the naked eye and renders it as a clear, shareable video.
The workflow is as simple as opening the app, pointing at the machine, and hitting record. Processing takes about 30 seconds. The output is a video that immediately shows you, and anyone you share it with, where the motion is and where to focus your attention.
No tripod required. No specialist required. No new hardware required.
Why We Named It “Motion Insights” — Not “Motion Amplification”
Motion Amplification is the most widely known term in the industry. It’s a perfectly accurate name and it describes exactly what the technology does. But we made a deliberate choice to call ours something different: Motion Insights.
Because what users actually want isn’t amplification. It’s understanding. It’s certainty. It’s the ability to take what the data is telling them and turn it into action.
Amplification shows motion.
Insight, paired with KCF’s SMARTdiagnostics, tells you what to do about it.
That’s the difference, and it shapes everything about how the product is designed, from the point-and-shoot workflow to the evidence-sharing features built for escalation. Our goal was taking vibration on a machine and translating it into something every role could act on, see, and believe.
What We’ve Learned So Far
We ran a beta program over the summer with a growing group of reliability professionals, and the feedback has been consistent: the open-and-record workflow is a hit. People love that they can walk up to a machine, open the app, and get a meaningful output in under a minute.
We also learned where we want to push further with stabilization for shaky hands, better performance in low-light and flickering overhead light environments, and expanded detection of lower-frequency motion like piping resonance. We built that in too.
Who It’s For
Motion Insights is for every reliability professional who has ever had a problem they could feel but couldn’t prove, who has ever struggled to communicate technical findings to a non-technical audience, or who has ever wanted the power of a motion amplification camera without the capital equipment request.
Which is to say: it’s for pretty much everyone. If you have a smartphone, you can use Motion Insights.
What’s Next
Motion Insights is officially available as part of the SMARTdiagnostics platform on our SD Connect mobile app. Your motion data lives alongside your vibration data, your thermal images, and your full asset history in one unified platform.
The phone in your pocket just became a reliability tool. We think it’s going to change how you see your machines and how you get things fixed.