Imagine the Product Design Possibilities with Customizable Smart Human Machine Interfaces

Human machine interfaces (HMI) are rapidly evolving to enable smarter, easier and more intuitive ways to interact with the many connected IoT devices and appliances in our homes and workplaces. Pushbuttons, sliders and dials are now ancient history, and even touch panels are being augmented and superseded by voice control and other touchless HMI technologies. With the explosion of smart speakers and voice assistants in recent years, we’ve embraced the convenience of voice control. And that’s just the beginning.

The latest advances in silicon, software and machine learning (ML) technologies are enabling an even smarter world of HMI possibilities. We’re seeing the emergence of ML-enabled edge devices capable of speech, face and gesture recognition, greatly simplifying how we control and interact with increasingly intelligent IoT devices. Welcome to the world of Smart Human Machine Interfaces (Smart HMI).

To accelerate this HMI transformation at scale, NXP has introduced a Smart HMI solution that reduces the cost and complexity of adding local voice control, speech recognition, and face and gesture recognition to a wide array of smart home products, white goods, small appliances, building automation devices and industrial IoT applications. With the NXP EdgeReady Smart HMI solution, OEMs can now differentiate their IoT products with new smart interface features while speeding up time to market.

Imagine the possibilities: refrigerators, ovens, washers and dryers, stand air-conditioners, thermostats, universal remote controls, home entertainment systems and countertop appliances ranging from coffee makers to food processors – all capable of being controlled through combinations of intuitive voice commands, gestures and face recognition. Smart HMI technology can also enable touch-free interfaces for elevators, medical equipment, payment kiosks, door locks and other building access controls.

Traditionally, a do-it-yourself approach to advanced HMI development can be challenging and complex, often requiring a lengthy learning curve or expertise in ML/AI, machine vision and speech recognition technologies. For mainstream embedded developers who want to add voice and vision to their IoT products, the NXP EdgeReady Smart HMI Solution is a game changer. Backed by NXP’s end-to-end support, it provides a turnkey HMI solution for developers of all skill levels, with all the hardware, software, tools and examples needed to progress from concept to production in a few months.

At the heart of the Smart HMI solution is the SLN-TLHMI-IoT development kit featuring NXP’s i.MX RT117H microcontroller (MCU). A member of the i.MX RT1170 family of crossover MCUs, the i.MX RT117H targets cost-sensitive HMI applications. The MCU’s dual-core architecture features NXP’s advanced implementation of the Arm® Cortex®-M7 core, operating at up to 1 GHz, and a power-efficient 400 MHz Cortex®-M4 core, providing ample performance and real-time response for edge ML and HMI multitasking. The i.MX RT117H is licensed to run NXP’s facial biometric authentication, audio front end runtime and ML speech engine runtime libraries. The MCU’s turnkey vision/voice algorithms, graphics display UI capabilities, memory resources and on-chip peripherals give developers the utmost flexibility to define and customize their products for different HMI use cases.

The SLN-TLHMI-IoT development kit comes with fully integrated, production-ready software and NXP’s one-stop-shop support, minimizing time to market, risk and development effort. The kit supports face and gesture recognition, far-field voice and speech recognition and high-quality 2D graphics displays in a versatile, cross-platform framework. Developers can customize these HMI elements to fit any smart appliance, smart home, smart building and industrial IoT application. The kit enables face/gesture recognition and voice control to be performed locally and entirely offline on the i.MX RT117H MCU, minimizing the user privacy, security and latency concerns associated with cloud-based implementations.

The Smart HMI development kit combines silicon, software and IP from NXP and leading third-party partners. The kit’s production-ready hardware is optimized for reduced cost and small form-factors and comes pre-integrated with fully tested, software and wireless, display and camera drivers. The comprehensive kit includes design files with schematics, bill of materials (BOM), layout and documentation and is supported by NXP’s popular MCUXpresso SDK. Sample smart coffee machine, elevator control and smart home panel apps provide a quick, out-of-the-box experience to accelerate development. NXP provides a single point of contact for customer support, streamlining licensing of all NXP and third-party software and easing procurement of NXP parts.

Add Smart HMI to Your Next-Generation IoT Products

Adding machine vision, face/gesture recognition and local voice control to IoT applications has never been easier and more cost-effective. To learn more about NXP’s EdgeReady Smart HMI solution, SLN-TLHMI-IoT development kit and i.MX RT117H MCU, visit www.nxp.com/mcu-smhmi.