On Distant Speech Recognition for Home Automation

The official version of this draft is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16226-3_7International audienceIn the framework of Ambient Assisted Living, home automation may be a solution for helping elderly people living alone at home. This study is part of the Sweet-Home project which aims at developing a new home automation system based on voice command to improve support and well-being of people in loss of autonomy. The goal of the study is vocal order recognition with a focus on two aspects: distance speech recognition and sentence spotting. Several ASR techniques were evaluated on a realistic corpus acquired in a 4-room flat equipped with microphones set in the ceiling. This distant speech French corpus was recorded with 21 speakers who acted scenarios of activities of daily living. Techniques acting at the decoding stage, such as our novel approach called Driven Decoding Algorithm (DDA), gave better speech recognition results than the baseline and other approaches. This solution which uses the two best SNR channels and a priori knowledge (voice commands and distress sentences) has demonstrated an increase in recognition rate without introducing false alarms

Frequent Use of Antibiotics Is Associated with Colorectal Cancer Risk : Results of a Nested Case-Control Study

BACKGROUND: Microbiotical dysbiosis induced by a Western diet seems to be associated with an increased risk of developing colorectal cancer (CRC). Few other factors with an effect on the colonic microbiota and their association with CRC have been evaluated. AIM: We investigated whether the use of antibiotics is associated with CRC risk. METHODS: Data on the use of antibiotics and comedication were extracted from a health insurance database for subjects with a diagnostic-related group for CRC between 2006 and 2011 and four age- and sex-matched controls. Antibiotic use was categorized according to the number of prescriptions during a 5-year follow-up period (1-6 years prior to CRC). Multivariable conditional binary logistic regression analysis was used to estimate odds ratios (ORs) and 95 % confidence intervals (95 % CIs) for different levels of use. RESULTS: A total of 4029 cases (47 % male, mean age at diagnosis 71 ± 11 years) and 15,988 controls were included. Antibiotics had been prescribed to 2630 (65.3 %) cases and 10,234 (64.0 %) controls (p = 0.13). An increasing use of antibiotics was associated with an increasing risk of CRC [multivariable OR for high (≥8 prescriptions) vs. no prescriptions: 1.26, 95 % CI 1.11-1.44, p-trend <0.01]. For each increase of 5 prescriptions, the OR for CRC was 1.05 (95 % CI 1.01-1.09). CONCLUSION: We found an association between the use of antibiotics, especially when used frequently, and the risk of developing CRC. Further studies are needed to establish under which conditions the use of antibiotics increases the risk of developing CRC