Abstract

The latest trends in home appliance industry are hyper-personalization and lifestyle-matching home solutions. To make this possible, home appliances should provide convenient features and intuitive user interface that allow end users to install and utilize various apps & services.

However, current home appliances could only offer simple control functions based on low-cost MCUs (Microcontroller Units). High-end operating systems such as Android and iOS are not suitable for home appliances due to their high performance hardware and highly complex software requirements.

Thus, LG Electronics has been developing its own custom chip-set with its own RTOS-based operating system that will enable long-term upgradability, user-oriented feature customization, and furthermore, AI-based life care.

In order to move from HW-centric home appliances to SW-centric life solutions, LG Electronics had to not only improve its development systems, but also transform the entire organization with the software-oriented mindset at all times.

In this talk, we will introduce our vision of the future life solutions and the underlying technologies encompassing OS, chip-set, IoT and AI technologies that will enable that vision. Also, we'll describe some of the challenges that we have faced along the way.