Development of Audio Sensing Technology for Ambient Assisted Living

TLDR

Ambient Assisted Living must anticipate inhabitants’ needs while ensuring safety and comfort, yet efficient audio analysis in noisy smart‑home environments remains a major challenge. The study aims to ease smart‑home interaction by presenting AuditHIS, a real‑time audio analysis system that responds to voice commands via microphones. AuditHIS is a real‑time audio analysis system tested in three smart‑home experiments that evaluate its performance. The results demonstrate the difficulty of the task and highlight the stakes and challenges of this promising technology in 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.