Are you planning to attend Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona (one of my favorite cities)? If so, please be sure to check out the connected car demo in Hall 5 Booth 5E41.

The AWS Greengrass team has been working on a proof of concept with our friends at Vodafone and Saguna to show you how connected cars can change the automotive industry. The demo is built around the emerging concept of multi-access edge computing, or MEC.

Car manufacturers want to provide advanced digital technology in their vehicles but don’t want to make significant upgrades to the on-board computing resources due to cost, power, and time-to-market considerations, not to mention the issues that arise when attempting to retrofit cars that are already on the road. MEC offloads processing resources to the edge of the mobile network, for instance a hub site in the access network. This model helps car manufacturers to take advantage of low-latency compute resources while building features that can evolve and improve over the lifetime of the vehicle, often 20 years or more. It also reduces the complexity and the cost of the on-board components.

The MWC demo streams a live video feed over Vodafone’s 4G LTE network, with Saguna’s AI-powered MEC solution that leverages AWS Greengrass. The demo focuses on driver safety, with the goal of helping to detect drivers that are distracted by talking to someone or something in the car. With an on-board camera aimed at the driver, backed up by AI-powered movement tracking and pattern detection running at the edge of the mobile network, distractions can be identified and the driver can be alerted. This architecture also allows manufacturers to enhance existing cars since most of the computing is handled at the edge of the mobile network.

If you couldn’t make it to Mobile World Congress, you can also check out the video for this solution, here.

— Jeff;