Abstract-By 2050, about a third of the French population will be over 65. Our laboratory's current research focuses on the monitoring of elderly people at home, to detect a loss of autonomy as early as possible. Our aim is to quantify criteria such as the international ADL or the French AGGIR scales, by automatically classifying the different Activities of Daily Living performed by the subject during the day. A Health Smart Home is used for this. Our Health Smart Home includes, in a real flat, Infra-Red Presence Sensors (location), door contacts (to control the use of some facilities), temperature and hygrometry sensor in the bathroom, and microphones (sound classification and speech recognition). A wearable kinematic sensor also informs on postural transitions (using pattern recognition) and walk periods (frequency analysis). This data collected from the various sensors, is then used to classify each temporal frame into one of the activities of daily living that was previously acquired (seven activities: hygiene, toilet use, eating, resting, sleeping, communication, and dressing/undressing). This is done using Support Vector Machines. We performed a one-hour experimentation with 13 young and healthy subjects to determine the models of the different activities and then we tested the classification algorithm (cross-validation) with real data.

Smart homes equipped with ambient intelligence technology constitute a promising direction to enable the growing number of elderly to continue to live in their own homes as long as possible. However, this calls for technological solutions that suit their specific needs and capabilities. The SWEET-HOME project aims at developing a new user friendly technology for home automation based on voice command. This paper reports a user evaluation assessing the acceptance and fear of this new technology. 8 healthy persons between 71 and 88 years old, 7 relatives (child, grandchild or friend) and 3 professional carers participated in a user evaluation. During about 45 minutes, the persons were questioned in co-discovery in the DOMUS smart home alternating between interview and wizard of Oz periods followed by a debriefing. The experience aimed at testing four important aspects of the project: voice command, communication with the outside world, domotics system interrupting a person's activity, and electronic agenda. Voice interface appeared to have a great potential to ease daily living for elderly and frail persons and would be better accepted than more intrusive solutions. By considering still healthy and independent elderly people in the user evaluation, an interesting finding that came up is their overall acceptance provided the system does not drive them to a lazy lifestyle by taking control of everything. This particular fear really needs to be This work is supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche

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This article presents an experiment with seniors and people with visual impairment in a voice-controlled smart home using the SWEET-HOME system. The experiment shows some weaknesses in automatic speech recognition that must be addressed, as well as the need for better adaptation to the user and the environment. Users were disturbed by the rigid structure of the grammar and were eager to adapt it to their own preferences. Surprisingly, while no humanoid aspect was introduced in the system, the senior participants were inclined to embody the system. Despite these aspects to improve, the system has been favorably assessed as diminishing most participant fears related to the loss of autonomy. . 2015. Evaluation of a context-aware voice interface for Ambient Assisted Living: qualitative user study vs. quantitative system evaluation.

Abstract-Today, the growth of the aging population in Europe needs an increasing number of health care professionals and facilities for aged persons. Medical telemonitoring at home (and, more generally, telemedicine) improves the patient's comfort and reduces hospitalization costs. Using sound surveillance as an alternative solution to video telemonitoring, this paper deals with the detection and classification of alarming sounds in a noisy environment. The proposed sound analysis system can detect distress or everyday sounds everywhere in the monitored apartment, and is connected to classical medical telemonitoring sensors through a data fusion process. The sound analysis system is divided in two stages: sound detection and classification. The first analysis stage (sound detection) must extract significant sounds from a continuous signal flow. A new detection algorithm based on discrete wavelet transform is proposed in this paper, which leads to accurate results when applied to nonstationary signals (such as impulsive sounds). The algorithm presented in this paper was evaluated in a noisy environment and is favorably compared to the state of the art algorithms in the field. The second stage of the system is sound classification, which uses a statistical approach to identify unknown sounds. A statistical study was done to find out the most discriminant acoustical parameters in the input of the classification module. New wavelet based parameters, better adapted to noise, are proposed in this paper. The telemonitoring system validation is presented through various real and simulated test sets. The global sound based system leads to a 3% missed alarm rate and could be fused with other medical sensors to improve performance.

Abstract-The SWEET-HOME project aims at providing audio-based interaction technology that lets the user have full control over her home environment, at detecting distress situations and at easing the social inclusion of the elderly and frail population. This paper presents an overview of the project focusing on the multimodal sound corpus acquisition and labelling and on the investigated techniques for speech and sound recognition. The user study and the recognition performances show the interest of this audio technology.

One of the greatest challenges in Ambient Assisted Living is to design health smart homes that anticipate the needs of its inhabitant while maintaining their safety and comfort. It is thus essential to ease the interaction with the smart home through systems that naturally react to voice command using microphones rather than tactile interfaces. However, efficient audio analysis in such noisy environment is a challenging task. In this paper, a real-time audio analysis system, the AuditHIS system, devoted to audio analysis in smart home environment is presented. AuditHIS has been tested thought three experiments carried out in a smart home that are detailed. The results show the difficulty of the task and serve as basis to discuss the stakes and the challenges of this promising technology in the domain of AAL.

Automatic human Activity Recognition (AR) is an important process for the provision of context-aware services in smart spaces such as voice-controlled smart homes. In this paper, we present an on-line Activities of Daily Living (ADL) recognition method for automatic identification within homes in which multiple sensors, actuators and automation equipment coexist, including audio sensors. Three sequence-based models are presented and compared: a Hidden Markov Model (HMM), Conditional Random Fields (CRF) and a sequential Markov Logic Network (MLN). These methods have been tested in two real Smart Homes thanks to experiments involving more than 30 participants. Their results were compared to those of three non-sequential models: a Support Vector Machine (SVM), a Random Forest (RF) and a non-sequential MLN. This comparative study shows that CRF gave the best results for on-line activity recognition from non-visual, audio and home automation sensors.