Radar Technology and Edge AI in Gesture-Controlled Headphones

Radar Technology and Edge AI in Gesture-Controlled Headphones
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Acconeer and Imagimob combined radar technology and Edge AI in gesture-controlled headphones they will showcase at CES 2020. The application has been trained to recognize five hand gestures with high accuracy and close to zero latency. It is the first result coming from a cooperation agreement between the companies that started in May this year.

By combining Edge AI software from Imagimob with the Pulsed Coherent Radar technology from Acconeer, the two companies have created an innovative platform for gesture control perfect for consumer electronics products. The two companies have made a long-term agreement to provide solutions based on the combination of mentioned technologies. While the headphones demo for CES is the first exciting result of this deep cooperation, the companies are working on several other projects together in robotics and in the automotive industry.

The market for small, accurate radar sensors combined with AI is rapidly becoming a growing business, which is shown by a number of recent commercial product launches. AI + Radar is a great match that can solve many different needs in markets for consumer electronics and other embedded systems where size, cost, and power consumption are key constraints. Headphones is a good example of this kind of product, where gesture control using radar and AI makes it possible to provide a smother, safer, and more intuitive interface for the user.

The A111 radar sensor is a low power, high precision, pulsed short-range radar sensor with a footprint of only 29 mm2. The small size and low power consumption make it ideal for integration into compact battery-driven devices. With the release of the new XM122 IoT module, using an Arm Cortex-M4 CPU, optimized for low power consumption and with wireless capabilities such as Bluetooth added, prototyping and integration in small devices with no room for a touch screen have been even further improved.

This first joint project Imagimob and Acconeer have been working on proves that the A111 sensor can be fitted into small wearable devices such headphones. The technology can be made to fit into all types of headphones including over-ear, on-ear and even in-ear headphones. The global industry for earphones and headphones is growing fast and is estimated to over $36 billion by 2024.