It watches. It does not steer.
You sit where you always sit and run the machine the way you always have. Nothing of ours is connected to it while that happens, so nothing of ours can move anything.
Apart from each other they are not a technique.
What your hands did
Where every control sits and how fast it is moving. The force at the grip, sampled faster than anything else, because the moment a lever breaks away from its detent is short and it is where the technique shows.
What the machine did back
Not just what your hand did, but what the machine did in answer. Overshoot, settling, hunting. A record of hands without a record of the answer is a gesture.
What you were looking at
The display is what the machine told you at the moment you acted. The frame is kept tight on purpose: your screen and your hands, and as little else as we can manage.
Timed against one clock, and held inside one chain, so an altered picture fails the same check as an altered reading.
Not assurances. Things a person can walk up to and check.
Nothing gets wired in
No harness cut, no controller touched, no power taken off the machine. Where a separate recorder is used it runs on its own battery and reads the dash the same way you do, by looking at it.
Your controls feel the same
A control has to behave under your hand exactly as it did before, and proving that is an acceptance every kit passes before it ships. If it changes the feel it is not fit to record the feel.
It cannot move a machine, or stop one
There is no actuator and no wire to one. It is not an interlock and it is not a guard, and no part of a safety case rests on it.
It cannot stay
It comes off in an afternoon, photographed before and after, and leaves no mark.
A box ticked in software is a claim software makes about itself.
A photograph of the disconnected state, carried inside the record where it cannot be swapped out quietly, is a claim a person made and can be held to. That is a different kind of evidence, and it is the kind that survives somebody asking hard questions two years later.
A procedure, not a judgement, so it is written as one.
The record is incomplete
A field the record needs is missing, or the chain does not verify. The reason names the first span that failed.
The consent was not live
The agreement covering the recording was not in force at the time it was made.
The set-up cannot be shown
Something was connected that should not have been, or the photograph or the check is missing, or the machine does not match its profile.
Refused is not a criticism of you. Every reason is about equipment or paperwork, and no check anywhere grades how you worked. A refused session is kept rather than thrown away and the reason travels with it, because a record of what went wrong is worth as much to us as a record of what went right.