The sweet-home project: Audio technology in smart homes to improve well-being and reliance

Abstract

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.

A real-time implementation of an acoustic novelty detector on the BeagleBoard-xM

“…The application scenario here considered is the monitoring of home environments for detecting emergencies and alarming situations in general [2][3][4][5]. Signals are here represented by the audio streams acquired by the microphones installed inside the house and normality is represented by the everyday sounds that occur in a home environment (e.g., people chatting, vacuum cleaner noise, kitchen sounds, etc.).…”

A Systematic Study for Smart Residential Thermostats: User Needs for the Input, Output, and Intelligence Level

“…Touchscreen interaction provides a high level of precision [9]. Voice interaction often acts as an assistive function for the touchscreen interaction [14,15]. Voice interaction is effective in situations where a user's hands and eyes are busy doing other tasks.…”

Distant speech recognition for home automation: Preliminary experimental results in a smart home

“…It aims at designing a new smart home system by focusing on three main aspects: to provide assistance via natural man-machine interaction (voice and tactile command), to ease social inclusion and to provide security reassurance by detecting situations of distress. If these aims are achieved, then the person will be able to pilot his environment at any time in the most natural way possible [9]. Acceptance of the system is definitely a big issue in our approach therefore, a qualitative user evaluation was performed to assess the acceptance of vocal technology in smart homes [10] at the beginning of the project and before the study presented in section 4.…”