This study aims at providing audio-based interaction technology that lets the users have full control over their home environment, at detecting distress situations and at easing the social inclusion of the elderly and frail population. The paper presents the sound and speech analysis system evaluated thanks to a corpus of data acquired in a real smart home environment. The 4 steps of analysis a...

In today’s residential market, clients are often faced with many challenges when designing and buying their own home. Most clients find it difficult to visualize exactly what they need by simply going through twodimensional (2D) blueprints or floor plans. Study shows that 2D visualization has a much steeper learning curve because human naturally sees three-dimensionally. Common tools used to cr...

The virtual home environment enables the use of same personalised services with familiar interfaces in any location regardless of access networks or terminal devices. The realisation of the virtual home environment requires advanced intelligence to be incorporated to networks for handling the diversity of the terminal and network landscape. In order to fulfil these requirements and to hide the ...

The emerging 3 generation services are provided through various types of networks and terminals. Roaming users rely on new kinds of wireless networks and terminals to offer mobility and make services available everywhere. The users’ requirement for continuous access to personalized services from any place, transparently and independently of the underlying network technology and the terminal or ...

In this paper we report an experimental comparison between three different types of audio reminders in the home setting: speech, earcons, and a simple pager sound. We examine how quickly and accurately participants were able to interpret the reminders, and to what extent presentation of the reminders interfered with a digit span background task. In addition, a questionnaire was used to gather u...

This paper reports some experiments which assess the potential use of a footstep biometric verification system for a smart home environment. We present a semi-automatic capture system and report results on a database with independent development and evaluation datasets comprised of more than 3500 footsteps collected from 55 persons. We present an optimisation of geometric and holistic feature e...

OBJECTIVE To explore the role of foods and the home environment in the development of Salmonella infections in infants and children. METHODS Home investigations were conducted of patients younger than 4 years of age infected with Salmonella. Cultures were obtained from foods, persons residing in the home, animals/pets/insects, and environmental sources. Like serotypes encountered in the index...

In this paper, we present HOME, a new environment for distributed hypermedia. We mainly concentrate on the server side, and provide access to World-Wide Web clients through a gateway mechanism. Data and metadata are strictly separated in the distributed HOME server. The architecture is based on a layered approach with separate layers for raw data, multimedia characteristics and hypermedia struc...

Today, robots are no longer limited to laboratory experiments; they have found their way into our homes. Being a physical entity itself, a robot can provide the functionality a regular computer does not possess. In the AIBO Monitor project, we use a domestic robot dog as a mediator for people to remotely monitor their home environment. Several design ideas have been explored and are presented i...