Helping to Resolve Customer Issues with Phone Hands-Free
Availability Time in a Vehicle

The first step of this multi-stage process would be to reproduce the issue being reported by the client’s customers. Since the issue was reported as occurring with a wide variety of devices of varying ages, testing would require a broad array of mobile phones and other mobile devices from Frontline Test Services’ industry-leading device library of over 2500 phones and mobile devices as well as infotainment systems representing hundreds of car models. The data collected would be utilized in a root cause analysis to assess the full nature and origin of the problems, and to inform recommendations we could make to improve the situation. The final stage of the project would be to perform a competitor analysis of multiple vehicles to determine performance comparisons. For this stage we would utilize our library of cars and car kits to generate a competitive analysis of connection performance.

In order to thoroughly investigate the issue, we needed to not only reproduce it, but to recreate it consistently for as many iterations as necessary. This required a combination of manual investigation from our Frontline Test Services subject matter experts, and SmartTest automated testing with our robotic arm. During this process we uncovered what was not a simple go/no-go issue, but a more nuanced problem related to connection times over a wide range of devices. The cause of the issue was linked to the number of phones paired with the car infotainment system and the algorithm that the infotainment system was using to find which of the paired phones was available for connection. The only way to test all the possible combination of number of phones paired and where in the list of phones the user phone appeared was to automate the entire process:

• The automation cleared the pairings from the infotainment system using the robot arm coupled with the intelligent vision system.
• An increasing number of phones (up to 10) were paired with the infotainment system to connect in each position in the list using the automation with the infotainment system and the phones.
• Automation activated the door and ignition to simulate someone entering the vehicle and starting the engine. Connection time between the phone and the vehicle were measured, and a capture of over-the-air Bluetooth data was performed. The system would then simulate someone turning off the ignition and leaving the vehicle. This was repeated 100 times for each phone combination for a total of 5000 measurements to provide a comprehensive picture of the infotainment systems behavior and to predict at what point a user would deem the delay unacceptable.
• We then performed a semi-automated benchmark analysis of 10 competitor vehicles, again capturing the over-the-air Bluetooth messages to determine which vehicle connection approach was the best.

The overall goal of the testing was to identify performance issues and improve upon connectivity issues in the new generation of Infotainment capabilities. SmartTest measured an overall improvement of both the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP) and the Hands-Free Profile (HFP). These are two key performance metrics in overall audio capabilities of the infotainment system.

With Frontline Test Services' knowledge, experience, and expertise the Tier 1 Infotainment supplier was able to show overall improvement as well as competitive analysis of their solution against other solutions that are on the road today. With the increase in overall vehicle satisfaction being measured by Infotainment systems, the improvements have helped increase the vehicle manufacturer’s overall rankings through JD Power. The improved performance has helped the Tier 1 supplier become the preferred solution for major car manufacturers.