People Tech Group Enables Digital Twin for Infotainment by Leveraging AWS IoT

Automotive Infotainment systems today are feature rich, connected and offer comfort, convenience and informational features to the driver and product usage insights to automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). OEMs are investing heavily to enhance end user experience with the Infotainment Head Units, also called as Digital Cockpits, being the center of the driver interaction universe.

These digital cockpits are powerful computing platforms that are loaded with OEM applications in addition to third party apps for navigation, music, marketplace etc. In this post you will learn how to leverage PeopleTech solution to gather insights in near real-time by ingesting and processing data in AWS cloud from infotainment systems at scale.

Challenges – Lack of insight on customer usage of infotainment features to make data driven decisions

As automakers are constantly looking to bring in next-generation infotainment features to enhance a customer’s in-car experience, they need better driver insights and customer usage of a vehicle’s infotainment features/options. In order to understand this better, OEMs are looking to get inputs on some of the following questions to make data driven decisions:

• What are the most/least used infotainment applications/features?
• How is the vehicle speed influencing the driver interaction?
• Is my Infotainment User Interface driver friendly, or is it difficult to use during the drive?
• How to validate market trend before deciding to invest or retire infotainment features/capabilities in the upcoming vehicle models?
• How do I reduce driver distraction?
• How can I create attractive infotainment option/features packages for the customers?

Why Digital Twin?

A Digital Twin is a virtual representation (visual and / or behavioral models) of a physical asset or process that could or currently exist in the physical world. If we can get real-time data of user interactions in-car, usage of infotainment features and their state, this would provide the data to answer the preceding questions which OEMs need to make data driven decisions. In other words, get the Digital Twin of the vehicle’s infotainment system and process the data for insights.  Cloud offers unlimited compute/storage to process, store the data and offer modern technology solutions like IoT, AI/ML and Data Lakes for analytics and AI-based engagement and applications.

Project Driver Interaction Analytics and Learning – DIALTM with AWS

PeopleTech, an AWS Partner, collaborated together with AWS to provide capability to auto makers to gather real-time data from infotainment system, store and process data at scale in AWS Cloud. Peopletech’s Project Dial TM with AWS aims to:

1) Secure connectivity and data exchange between Human Machine Interface (HMI) and AWS Cloud

2) Improve the understanding of user interactions which serves as inputs to develop features to enhance future HMIs

3) Learn driver-specific usage patterns

4) Reduce driver distraction

5) Understand demography-based HMI, app usage patterns and provide enhanced solutions and automaker to can leverage the insights to bundle most appealing product package based on Region.

6) Help car makers and suppliers optimize their Infotainment solutions and investments.

7) Flexible Ecosystem to deploy custom scenario definitions for Edge Analytics in addition to direct data collection. Example of custom scenario definition – ex: anomaly detection, limited time product feature testing based on condition.

Project Dial solution provides In-vehicle DialApp, that does non-intrusive data collection from various HMI Applications, Vehicle Data Bus and other vehicle sensors and actuators and securely pushes the data to AWS IoT Core. All the private and sensitive information is encrypted for security.

Amazon Kinesis Firehouse captures the data from AWS IoT Core, process the data to Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB for storage. AWS Lambda runs the logic to process user interaction data. Amazon QuickSight is used for visualizing the data to draw conclusions and take actions. Amazon Simple Notification Services (SNS), fully managed messaging service was also integrated in this solution so notifications can be sent to applications and users.

PeopleTech Automotive Center for Future with its deep experience in Human Machine Interface (UI/UX) and automotive infotainment joined hands with AWS in the quest to enhance in-vehicle experience .  To learn more about PeopleTech Automotive Center for Future, please click here.