A Data-Driven Vibration Analysis Framework for Micro-Motor Fault Diagnosis and Quality Control

Abstract

The reliability of the internal micro-motors is crucial for the performance and lifespan of electric toothbrushes. In this paper, a vibration-based fault detection method is proposed to identify micro-motor defects in electric toothbrushes. A dedicated signal acquisition device was designed and developed to capture the vibration signals of micro-motors using a high-precision accelerometer. To effectively characterize the micro-motor conditions, comprehensive features were extracted from the raw vibration data in both the time and frequency domains. A random forest (RF) algorithm was then employed to evaluate the importance of all extracted features. To better interpret the extracted features based on fault mechanisms, and to reduce dimensionality and computational overhead while avoiding overfitting, the top three features with the highest importance scores were selected to form the optimal feature subset. Finally, a support vector machine (SVM) model was utilized to classify the motor states based on the selected features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method, combining RF-based feature selection and SVM classification, achieves outstanding diagnostic performance. Specifically, the model yields a balanced accuracy of 94.44%, a defect recall of 88.89%, a defect F1-score of 94.12%, a Matthews correlation coefficient of 93.74%, a geometric mean of 94.28%, and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 100.00%. These robust metrics confirm that the proposed approach can accurately and efficiently detect micro-motor faults in electric toothbrushes, providing a practical and reliable solution for quality control and condition monitoring in manufacturing.