Pedro Chahuara

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.

Making Context Aware Decision from Uncertain Information in a Smart Home: A Markov Logic Network Approach

This research addresses the issue of building home automation systems reactive to voice for improved comfort and autonomy at home. The focus of this paper is on the context-aware decision process which uses a dedicated Markov Logic Network approach to benefit from the formal logical representation of domain knowledge as well as the ability to handle uncertain facts inferred from real sensor data. The approach has been experiemented in a real smart home with naive and users with special needs.

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.

Using Markov Logic Network for On-Line Activity Recognition from Non-visual Home Automation Sensors

This paper presents the application of Markov Logic Networks(MLN) for the the recognition of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) in a smart home. We describe a procedure that uses raw data from non visual and non wearable sensors in order to create a classification model leveraging logic formal representation and probabilistic inference. SVM and Naive Bayes methods were used as baselines to compare the performance of our implementation, as they have proved to be highly efficient in classification tasks. The evaluation was carried out on a real smart home where 21 participants performed ADLs. Results show not only the appreciable capacities of MLN as a classifier, but also its potential to be easily integrable into a formal knowledge representation framework.

On-line Human Activity Recognition from Audio and Home Automation Sensors: comparison of sequential and non-sequential models in realistic Smart Homes

Automatic human Activity Recognition (AR) is an important process for the provision of context-aware services in smart spaces such as voice-controlled smart homes. In this paper, we present an on-line Activities of Daily Living (ADL) recognition method for automatic identification within homes in which multiple sensors, actuators and automation equipment coexist, including audio sensors. Three sequence-based models are presented and compared: a Hidden Markov Model (HMM), Conditional Random Fields (CRF) and a sequential Markov Logic Network (MLN). These methods have been tested in two real Smart Homes thanks to experiments involving more than 30 participants. Their results were compared to those of three non-sequential models: a Support Vector Machine (SVM), a Random Forest (RF) and a non-sequential MLN. This comparative study shows that CRF gave the best results for on-line activity recognition from non-visual, audio and home automation sensors.

Context-aware decision making under uncertainty for voice-based control of smart home

This paper presents a framework to build home automation systems reactive to voice for improved comfort and autonomy at home. The focus of this paper is on the context-aware decision process which must reason from uncertain facts inferred from real sensor data. This framework for building context aware systems uses a hierarchical knowledge model so that different inference modules can communicate and reason with same concepts and relations. The context-aware decision module is based on a Markov Logic Network, a recent approach which make it possible to benefit from formal logical representation and to model uncertainty of this knowledge. In this work, uncertainty of the decision model has been learned from data. Although some expert systems are able to deal with uncertainty, the Markov Logic Network approach brings a unified theory for dealing with logical entailment, uncertainty and missing data. Moreover, the ability to use a priori knowledge and to learn weights and structure from data make this model appealing to address the challenge of adaptation of expert systems to new applications. Finally, the framework has been implemented in an on-line system which has been evaluated in a real smart home with real naive users. Results of the experiment show the interest of context-aware decision making and the advantages of a statistical relational model for the framework.

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.