ABSTRACT
For hundreds of years the term ‘diagnostics’ was associated exclusively with medicine as it is the field concerned with the methods of identifying sicknesses based on observed symptoms. This term is derived from Greek word diagnosis which means recognition, whereas diagnosticós represents the ability to recognise. In the second half of the twentieth century technical diagnostics began to be developed based on the same idea-to recognise the state of a technical object by means of objective methods and by means of tracing symptoms associated with the object’s exploitation (Cholewa and Ko cielny in Korbicz et al. 2004). More precisely, diagnostics evaluates the state of an object by investigating the properties of the operational process of the object together with processes associated with it and/or by studying the products of the object if any.
