Norbert Noury

First steps in data fusion between a multichannel audio acquisition and an information system for home healthcare

The health integrated smart home information system (HIS2) has been developed in the TIMC laboratory for the remote monitoring of the health status of the elderly at home. This aims at improving patients living conditions and at avoiding the costs of the long hospitalization. The design of this system is based on a CAN network linked to volumetric, physiological and environment sensors. Collaboration between the TIMC and the CLIPS laboratories permitted us to replace the video camera, unacceptable to patients for obvious privacy reasons, with a system based on multichannel sound acquisition. The coupling of both systems will enable them to detect if a person is in distress or not. Both systems locally process in real time the incoming data and communicate using a CAN network to display the health status. This article describes briefly the architecture of both systems, practical solutions for their communication, and their data fusion which is the beginning of a new step in the health smart homes domain.

Complete Sound and Speech Recognition System for Health Smart Homes: Application to the Recognition of Activities of Daily Living

This chapter presents the AUDITHIS system which performs real-time sound analysis from eight microphone channels in Health Smart Home associated to the autonomous speech analyzer RAPHAEL. The evaluation of AUDITHIS and RAPHAEL in different settings showed that audio modality is very promising to acquire information that are not available through other classical sensors. Audio processing is also the most natural way for a human to interact with his environment. Thus, this approach particularly fits Health Smart Homes that include home automation (e.g., voice command) or other high level interactions (e.g., dialogue). The originality of the work is also to include sounds of daily living as indicators to distinguish distress from normal situations. First development gave acceptable results for the sound recognition (72% correct classification) and we are working on the reduction of missed-alarm rate to improve performance in the near future. Although the current system suffers a number of limitations and that we raised numerous challenges that need to be addressed, the pair AUDITHIS and RAPHAEL is, to the best of our knowledge, one of the first serious attempts to build a real-time system that consider sound and speech analysis for ambient assisted living. This work also includes several evalu- ations on data acquired from volunteers in a real health smart home condition. Further work will include refinement of the acoustic models to adapt the speech recognition to the aged population as well as connexion to home automation systems.

Computer simulation of the activity of the elderly person living independently in a Health Smart Home

We propose a simulator of human activities collected with presence sensors in our experimental Health Smart Home Habitat Intelligent pour la Sante (HIS). We recorded 1492 days of data on several experimental HIS during the French national project AILISA. On these real data, we built a mathematical model of the behavior of the data series, based on Hidden Markov Models (HMM). The model is then played on a computer to produce simulated data series with added flexibility to adjust the parameters in various scenarios. We also tested several methods to measure the similarity between our real and simulated data. Our simulator can produce large data base which can be further used to evaluate the algorithms to raise an alarm in case of loss in autonomy.

Preliminary investigation into the use of Autonomous Fall Detectors

A study was realized in France to meet the requirements of an autonomous fall sensor worn on the body. It consisted of a written questionnaire of which 149 were returned completed, which reveals that users are favorable to the use of a portable fall detector, worn like a watch, all through their daily activities, with a special wish for an audio feed back of the correct activity and, moreover, are ready to pay for the service on a monthly rate basis.

Level of activity, night and day alternation, and well being measured in a smart hospital suite

The present paper reports a study on the daily activity of elderly people in a hospital suite, with presence infrared sensors. It is an attempt to produce parameters and indicators for the predictive analysis of the daily activity of fragile persons. A relationship is proposed between well being of the patient and the night and day activities alternation.

Ambient Multi-Perceptive System with Electronic Mails for a Residential Health Monitoring System

Based on several years of experiments, we propose a model of information systems for residential healthcare, and technical guide to select available hard and software technologies. An implementation is described, based on Emails. The system is under experimentation within the framework of the French national project AILISA

Data Fusion for Analysis of Persistence in Pervasive Actimetry of Elderly People at Home, and the Notion of Biological Age

If we watch elderly people at home for health or security purposes, we need a reliable pervasive information from a domestic network of localizing sensors allowing to follow the different locations at which the dependent persons can be detected. The data recorded can be treated as the sequence of color coded numbers of balls (symbolizing rooms) taken in a Polyas urn, in which the persistence of the presence in a room is taken into account by adding a certain number of balls of the same color as the ball just drawn. We discuss the pertinency of such a procedure to early detect sudden or chronic changes in the parameters values of the random process made of the succession of ball numbers and we use it to trigger alarms, whose level depends on the real biological age of the elderly people watched at home.

Ambient intelligence might support increased longevity.

Several technologies entered our homes to change our lives. First electricity brought light and comfort, now communication technologies are transforming our living place into a connected place allowing new services to be invented, comfort, security, wellness and health services. The ICTs in homes can now help prolonge our longevity.