FIT A Fog Computing Device for Speech TeleTreatments

There is an increasing demand for smart fogcomputing gateways as the size of cloud data is growing. This paper presents a Fog computing interface (FIT) for processing clinical speech data. FIT builds upon our previous work on EchoWear, a wearable technology that validated the use of smartwatches for collecting clinical speech data from patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). The fog interface is a low-power embedded system that acts as a smart interface between the smartwatch and the cloud. It collects, stores, and processes the speech data before sending speech features to secure cloud storage. We developed and validated a working prototype of FIT that enabled remote processing of clinical speech data to get speech clinical features such as loudness, short-time energy, zero-crossing rate, and spectral centroid. We used speech data from six patients with PD in their homes for validating FIT. Our results showed the efficacy of FIT as a Fog interface to translate the clinical speech processing chain (CLIP) from a cloud-based backend to a fog-based smart gateway.Comment: 3 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, 2nd IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing SMARTCOMP 2016, Missouri, USA, 201

Smart radio and audio apps: the politics and paradoxes of listening to (anti-) social media

The recent crop of vocal social media applications tends to appeal to users in terms of getting their voices heard loud and clear. Indeed, it is striking how often verbs like ‘shout’ and ‘boast’ and ‘brag’ are associated with microcasting platforms with such noisy names as Shoutcast, Audioboom, Hubbub, Yappie, Boast and ShoutOmatic. In other words, these audio social media are often promoted in rather unsociable terms, appealing less to the promise of a new communicative exchange than to the fantasy that we will each can be at the centre of attention of an infinite audience. Meanwhile, many of the new forms of online radio sell their services to listeners as offering ‘bespoke’ or ‘responsive’ programming (or ‘audiofeeds’), building up a personal listening experience that meets their individual needs and predilictions. The role of listening in this new media ecology is characterised, then, by similarly contradictory trends. Listening is increasingly personalised, privatised, masterable and measurable, but also newly shareable, networked and, potentially, public. The promotional framing of these new media suggests a key contradiction at play in these new forms of radio and audio, speaking to a neo-liberal desire for a decentralization of broadcasting to the point where every individual has a voice, but where the idea of the audience is invoked as a mass network of anonymous and yet thoroughly privatised listeners. Focusing on the promotion and affordances of these various new radio- and radio-like applications for sharing speech online, this article seeks to interrogate what is at stake in these contradictions in terms of the ongoing politics, experience and ethics of listening in a mediated world