Yuto Tanaka

Detecting system of approaching vehicles using an ultrasonic wave

The elderly population is increasing, and the traffic environment surrounding elderly people is not safe. We can prevent traffic accidents at an early stage by jumping out of the way if we perceive that the approaching vehicle may collide with the walking elderly person. Therefore, we think that it would be useful if we could build a system to inform us of the approaching vehicle by a supersonic wave. In this paper, using a supersonic wave loudspeaker attached to a vehicle, we proposed the technique to detect approaching vehicles on the sidewalk. We found that we could detect areas around 50 m with a high probability of more than 80% by using a tone burst as input to the supersonic wave loudspeaker.

Study on the Improvement of Intelligibility for Elderly Speech Using Formant Frequency Shift Method

In general, aging is progressing in developed countries. Elderly people have difficulty controlling their articulation accurately due to aging. We need to improve the quality of elderly speech for smooth communication. In this paper, we analyzed the 1st formant frequency (F1) and 2nd formant frequency (F2) between the more intelligible speech and less intelligible speech of Japanese elderly people. In addition, we improved the intelligibility of less intelligible elderly speech by using the formant frequency shift method. This method is the correcting by shift value of formant frequency based on LPC. The shift value is the magnification such as expanding the F1-F2 size of less intelligible speech.