Development of Audio Sensing Technology for Ambient Assisted Living

Abstract

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.

On Distant Speech Recognition for Home Automation

“…Voice-User Interface in domestic environment has recently gained interest in the speech processing community as exemplified by the rising number of smart home projects that considers Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in their design [45] [49]. However, though VUIs are frequently employed in close domains (e.g., smart phone) there are still important challenges to overcome [3]. Indeed, the task imposes several constraints to the speech technology:…”

“…Despite the fact that audio technology has a great potential to become one of the major interaction modalities in Smart Home, this modality is seldom taken into consideration [5][6] [7] [8]. The most important reason is that audio technology as not reached a sufficient stage of maturity and that there is still some challenges to overcome [3]. The Sweet-Home project presented in Section 3.1 aims at designing an audio analysis system running in real-time for voice commands recognition in a realistic home automation context.…”

“…The Sweet-Home project was set up to integrate sound based technology within smart homes to provide natural interaction with the home automation system at any time and from anywhere in the house. As emphasized by Vacher et al [3], major issues still need to be overcome. For instance, the presence of uncontrolled noise is a real obstacle for distant speech recognition and identification of voice commands in continuous audio recording conditions when the person is moving and acting in the flat.…”

Development of Automatic Speech Recognition Techniques for Elderly Home Support: Applications and Challenges

“…However, there are still important challenges to overcome before implementing VUIs in a smart home [36] and this new technology must be validated in real conditions with potential users [25].…”

Everyday Life Sounds Database: Telemonitoring of Elderly or Disabled

“…In References [10,25,27], Fleury, Vacher, and coworkers defined six categories of sounds except speech: (i) human sounds; (ii) object and supply manipulation, linked to the activity of a person; (iii) outside sounds; (iv) sound of devices; (v) sound of running water -this particular category provides interesting information on activities such as disposal, hygiene, and meal preparation; and (vi) other sounds. Examples of each category are presented in Table 1.…”