Brigitte Meillon

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

The Sweet-Home project aims at providing audio-based interaction technology that lets the user have full control over their 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.

Evaluation of a Context-Aware Voice Interface for Ambient Assisted Living: Qualitative User Study vs. Quantitative System Evaluation

This article presents an experiment with seniors and people with visual impairment in a voice-controlled smart home using the Sweet-Home system. The experiment shows some weaknesses in automatic speech recognition that must be addressed, as well as the need for better adaptation to the user and the environment. Users were disturbed by the rigid structure of the grammar and were eager to adapt it to their own preferences. Surprisingly, while no humanoid aspect was introduced in the system, the senior participants were inclined to embody the system. Despite these aspects to improve, the system has been favorably assessed as diminishing most participant fears related to the loss of autonomy.

The Sweet-Home project: Audio processing and decision making in smart home to improve well-being and reliance

The Sweet-Home project aims at providing audio-based interaction technology that lets the user have full control over their 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 implemented techniques for speech and sound recognition as context-aware decision making with uncertainty. A user experiment in a smart home demonstrates the interest of this audio-based technology.

The Influence of Facial Interface Design on Dynamic Emotional Recognition

The use of facial interfaces in distant communications highlights the relevance of emotional recognition. However researches on emotional facial expression (EFE) recognition are mainly based on static and posed stimuli and their results are not much transferable to daily interactions. The purpose of the present study is to compare emotional recognition of authentic EFEs with 11 different interface designs. A widget allowing participants both to recognize an emotion and to assess it on-line was used. Divided-face and compound-face interfaces are compared with a common full frontal interface. Analytic and descriptive on-line results reveal that some interfaces facilitate emotional recognition whereas others would decrease it. This study suggests that relevant interfaces could improve emotional recognition and thus facilitate distant communications.

Oudjat: A configurable and usable annotation tool for the study of facial expressions of emotion☆

This paper describes Oudjat, a new software program which has been developed in order to conduct recognition experiments. Oudjat is dedicated to the manual annotation facial expressions of emotion (FEE). Considering the existence of other software applications in that field, Oudjat provides a compromise solution between the currently existing tools. For the investigators, it is an easy-to-configure interface to set up relevant behaviors to be annotated. For the annotators, it is an easy-to-use interface. This tool can perform complex annotations procedures utilizing multiple responses panels such as buttons, scales (e.g., Likert scales), and free labelling. Oudjat also allows to chain response panels or to conduct sequence marking annotations (i.e., two-steps temporal annotation). As it can be configured in any language, Oudjat is particularly suited for intercultural experiments. Four annotation procedures are presented to illustrate Oudjat’s possibilities with FEE annotation. Oudjat is an open source software available to the scientific community, and can be freely be obtained on request.

Plateforme d'utilisabilité/usage MultiCom: objectifs, réalisation, usages et retours d'expérience

This article describes the design approach and experience gained when implementing an original usability laboratory: the MultiCom platform. The purpose of this platform is the evaluation of the usability and usage of a wide range of interactive systems: from classic systems to ubiquitous environments. For this, the platform was designed as a large theater where acts could be played. The relevance of the design choices (surface, ground plane, automation) was validated through several experiments that were successfully carried out on the platform.