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

Vocal command may have considerable advantages in terms of usability in the AAL domain. However, efficient audio analysis in smart home environment is a challenging task in large part because of bad speech recognition results in the case of elderly people. Dedicated speech corpora were recorded and employed to adapted generic speech recognizers to this type of population. Evaluation results of a first experiment allowed to draw conclusions about the distress call detection. A second experiments involved participants who played fall scenarios in a realistic smart home, 67 % of the distress calls were detected online. These results show the difficulty of the task and serve as basis to discuss the stakes and the challenges of this promising technology for AAL.

[1]  C L Ludlow,et al.  Aging Effects on Motor Units in the Human Thyroarytenoid Muscle , 2000, The Laryngoscope.

[2]  Michel Vacher,et al.  CIRDO: Smart companion for helping elderly to live at home for longer ☆ , 2014 .

[3]  M. Barkat-Defradas,et al.  Syntactic and lexical context of pauses and hesitations in the discourse of Alzheimer patients and healthy elderly subjects , 2011, Clinical linguistics & phonetics.

[4]  Hsiao-Wuen Hon,et al.  An overview of the SPHINX speech recognition system , 1990, IEEE Trans. Acoust. Speech Signal Process..

[5]  Stephen S. Intille,et al.  Designing a Home of the Future , 2002, IEEE Pervasive Comput..

[6]  Eric Campo,et al.  A review of smart homes - Present state and future challenges , 2008, Comput. Methods Programs Biomed..

[7]  Alexandra König,et al.  Validation of an automatic video monitoring system for the detection of instrumental activities of daily living in dementia patients. , 2015, Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD.

[8]  Michel Vacher,et al.  Development of Audio Sensing Technology for Ambient Assisted Living: Applications and Challenges , 2011, Int. J. E Health Medical Commun..

[9]  Kallirroi Georgila,et al.  Speech Input from Older Users in Smart Environments: Challenges and Perspectives , 2009, HCI.

[10]  Heidi Christensen,et al.  Adaptive speech recognition and dialogue management for users with speech disorders , 2014, INTERSPEECH.

[11]  Arran Holmes,et al.  The iDorm : Gateway to Heterogeneous Networking Environments , 2003 .

[12]  Brigitte Meillon,et al.  Design and evaluation of a smart home voice interface for the elderly: acceptability and objection aspects , 2011, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[13]  Diane J. Cook,et al.  Behavior-Based Home Energy Prediction , 2012, 2012 Eighth International Conference on Intelligent Environments.

[14]  Florence Cros,et al.  The user-centered design of an ambient technology for preventing falls at home , 2014 .

[15]  Brigitte Meillon,et al.  The Sweet-Home speech and multimodal corpus for home automation interaction , 2014, LREC.

[16]  Michel Vacher,et al.  Multichannel automatic recognition of voice command in a multi-room smart home: an experiment involving seniors and users with visual impairment , 2014, INTERSPEECH.

[17]  P. B. Mueller,et al.  Acoustic and morphologic study of the senescent voice. , 1984, Ear, nose, & throat journal.

[18]  Gérard Chollet,et al.  Hands-free speech-sound interactions at home , 2012, 2012 Proceedings of the 20th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO).

[19]  Andreas P. Schmidt,et al.  SOPRANO – An extensible , open AAL platform for elderly people based on semantical contracts 1 , 2008 .

[20]  James R. Glass,et al.  Probabilistic Dialogue Modeling for Speech-Enabled Assistive Technology , 2013, SLPAT.

[21]  Steve Young,et al.  HMMs and related speech recognition technologies , 2008 .

[22]  Steve Renals,et al.  Longitudinal study of ASR performance on ageing voices , 2008, INTERSPEECH.

[23]  Bart Vanrumste,et al.  Self-taught assistive vocal interfaces: an overview of the ALADIN project , 2013, INTERSPEECH.

[24]  Isabel Trancoso,et al.  Impact of Age in ASR for the Elderly: Preliminary Experiments in European Portuguese , 2012, IberSPEECH.

[25]  Sweeney Rj,et al.  Acoustic and morphologic study of the senescent voice. , 1984 .

[26]  James M. Keller,et al.  A smart home application to eldercare: current status and lessons learned. , 2009, Technology and health care : official journal of the European Society for Engineering and Medicine.

[27]  Marc Cavazza,et al.  How was your day?: a companion ECA , 2010, AAMAS.

[28]  K. Burk,et al.  Perceptual and acoustic correlates of aging in the speech of males. , 1974, Journal of communication disorders.

[29]  Carmen D Dirksen,et al.  Literature review on monitoring technologies and their outcomes in independently living elderly people , 2015, Disability and rehabilitation. Assistive technology.

[30]  Michel Vacher,et al.  SVM-Based Multimodal Classification of Activities of Daily Living in Health Smart Homes: Sensors, Algorithms, and First Experimental Results , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine.

[31]  Francois Bremond,et al.  A Computer system to monitor older adults at home: Preliminary results , 2009 .

[32]  A. Timmermans,et al.  Technology-assisted training of arm-hand skills in stroke: concepts on reacquisition of motor control and therapist guidelines for rehabilitation technology design , 2009, Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation.

[33]  Daniel Povey,et al.  The Kaldi Speech Recognition Toolkit , 2011 .

[34]  Ana Llena-Nozal,et al.  La prise en charge de la dépendance , 2011 .

[35]  Ramón Fernández Astudillo,et al.  The DIRHA-GRID corpus: baseline and tools for multi-room distant speech recognition using distributed microphones , 2014, INTERSPEECH.

[36]  Alex Mihailidis,et al.  Development of an automated speech recognition interface for personal emergency response systems , 2009, Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation.

[37]  Liyanage C. De Silva,et al.  State of the art of smart homes , 2012, Eng. Appl. Artif. Intell..

[38]  Michel Vacher,et al.  Experimental Evaluation of Speech Recognition Technologies for Voice-based Home Automation Control in a Smart Home , 2013, SLPAT.

[39]  Heidi Christensen,et al.  homeService: Voice-enabled assistive technology in the home using cloud-based automatic speech recognition , 2013, SLPAT.