We’re nonetheless sifting by way of among the cool product demos from CES final month, and one which caught my eye was the demo by NXP of a presence-sensing cooktop powered by an embedded MCU. In line with the corporate, the system used a Neural Processing Unit that runs the machine studying and facial-recognition algorithms throughout the system fairly than counting on a cloud-based compute. The demo featured a tool management interface from Diehl Controls.

As will be seen within the video beneath (taken by TIRIAS Analysis Principal Analyst Francis Sideco), NXP spokesperson Thomas Herbert reveals that you may activate the burner with both contact or movement sensing (together with movement sensing with cooking mitts on). From there, the system is utilizing facial recognition to detect if an individual is inside native proximity of the cooktop. In line with Herbert, presence detection comes into play in a state of affairs the place there’s a important state, such because the pan getting too scorching and there’s water boiling over. If the system detects a important state and nobody is standing across the range, it can shut off the warmth and may ship an alert to the individual through a Matter (an open-source sensible dwelling connectivity customary) enabled system to alert the cook dinner that the system has intervened on their behalf.

The demo is attention-grabbing to me in a few contexts. One is that, as we’ve written about right here on the Spoon, the primary cause for fires within the dwelling is because of cooking mishaps, and enabling your stovetop or different cooking home equipment to acknowledge each anomalies in addition to the presence of somebody may very well be an actual gamechanger, akin to the dip in vehicle accidents lately as a result of widespread prevalence of blindspot detection techniques in trendy vehicles.

The second context that’s attention-grabbing is that it may grow to be a big expertise in helping aging-in-place situations, significantly for seniors who grow to be just a little extra forgetful as they age. One of many key determinants of whether or not of us can proceed to dwell independently is their means to feed themselves, and by offering “blind spot” detection like this, my guess is this might prolong many seniors’ means to dwell independently for years.

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