Full paper: Speech-based interaction in an AAL-context

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges in Ambient Assisted Living is to develop smart homes that anticipate the health needs of their inhabitants while maintaining their safety and comfort. To facilitate interactions with the smart home, systems that respond naturally to voice commands would be the most adequate for disabled and frail people. In this paper we present two studies aiming at investigating the feasibility of such interactive systems. In the first study, the acceptability of a voice interface as part of the smart home was investigated. The second study is related to the adaptation of speech recognition technologies to the senior population; population which is known to challenge standard ASR systems. To this aim, we recorded two specific speech corpora (Voice-Age and ERES38) which were analyzed in a semi automatic manner to reveal the aged-voice characteristics. Some phonemes are more affected by age than others and this study shows that, by adapting acoustic models to seniors, performances increase. Voice interfaces appear to have a great potential to ease daily living for elderly and frail persons and would be better accepted than more intrusive solutions. 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. Smart homes must support daily living by giving seniors more ability to control rather than acting in place of people.