Home monitoring for frailty detection through sound and speaker diarization analysis

As the French, European and worldwide populations are aging, there is a strong interest for new systems that guarantee a reliable and privacy preserving home monitoring for frailty prevention. This work is a part of a global environmental audio analysis system which aims to help identification of Activities of Daily Life (ADL) through human and everyday life sounds recognition, speech presence and number of speakers detection. The focus is made on the number of speakers detection. In this article, we present how recent advances in sound processing and speaker diarization can improve the existing embedded systems. We study the performances of two new methods and discuss the benefits of DNN based approaches which improve performances by about 100%.Comment: JETSAN, Jun 2023, Aubervilliers & Paris, Franc

Privacy Preserving Personal Assistant with On-Device Diarization and Spoken Dialogue System for Home and Beyond

In the age of personal voice assistants, the question of privacy arises. These digital companions often lack memory of past interactions, while relying heavily on the internet for speech processing, raising privacy concerns. Modern smartphones now enable on-device speech processing, making cloud-based solutions unnecessary. Personal assistants for the elderly should excel at memory recall, especially in medical examinations. The e-ViTA project developed a versatile conversational application with local processing and speaker recognition. This paper highlights the importance of speaker diarization enriched with sensor data fusion for contextualized conversation preservation. The use cases applied to the e-VITA project have shown that truly personalized dialogue is pivotal for individual voice assistants. Secure local processing and sensor data fusion ensure virtual companions meet individual user needs without compromising privacy or data security.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, to be presented at https://ihiet-ai.org/, Lausanne in April 202

Diarisation multimodale : vers des modèles robustes et justes en contexte réel

Speaker diarization, or the task of automatically determining "who spoke, when?" in an audio or video recording, is one of the pillars of modern conversation analysis systems. On television, the content broadcasted is very diverse and covers about every type of conversation, from calm discussions between two people to impassioned debates and wartime interviews. The archiving and indexing of this content, carried out by the Newsbridge company, requires robust and fair processing methods. In this work, we present two new methods for improving systems' robustness via fusion approaches. The first method focuses on voice activity detection, a necessary pre-processing step for every diarization system. The second is a multimodal approach that takes advantage of the latest advances in natural language processing. We also show that recent advances in diarization systems make the use of speaker diarization realistic, even in critical sectors such as the analysis of large audiovisual archives or the home care of the elderly. Finally, this work shows a new method for evaluating the algorithmic fairness of speaker diarization, with the objective to make its use more responsible.La diarisation du locuteur, c'est à dire la tache de déterminer automatiquement « qui parle, quand ? » dans un enregistrement audio ou vidéo, est un des piliers des systèmes modernes d'analyse des conversations. A la télévision, les contenus diffusés sont divers et couvrent à peu près tous les types de conversations, de la discussion calme entre deux personnes, aux débats passionnés, en passant par les interviews en terrain de guerre. L'analyse de ces contenus, réalisée par la société Newsbridge, requiert, en vue de leur archivage et de leur indexation, des méthodes de traitement robustes et justes. Dans ce travail, nous présentons deux nouvelles méthodes permettant d'améliorer la robustesse des systèmes via des approches de fusion. La première se concentre sur la détection d'activité vocale, prétraitement nécessaire à tout système de diarisation. La seconde est une approche multimodale qui tire notamment parti des dernières avancées en traitement du langage naturel. Nous voyons également que les récentes avancées des systèmes de diarisation rendent l'utilisation de la diarisation du locuteur réaliste y compris dans des secteurs critiques tels que l'analyse de larges archives audiovisuelles ou le maintien à domicile de personnes âgées. Enfin ce travail présente une nouvelle méthode d'évaluation de la justesse algorithmique de la diarisation du locuteur en vue de rendre son utilisation plus responsable

Influence of temperature on HTO and ^{36}$cl- diffusion in bentonite and callovo-oxfordian clays

International audienceThe Callovo-Oxfordian formation at Bures in the Paris Basin (France) has been chosen as a potential host rock for deep radioactive waste disposal. Bentonite MX80 is proposed as buffer barrier surrounding the canisters. These materials have very low permeability and diffusion is likely to be the predominant mechanism transfer governing radionuclide migration. High level waste disposal will induce a temperature increase in these barriers. In a dilute solvent, this effect is described by the Stokes-Einstein law D$^ \infty$$_{IS}$ = k T /6 $\pi$ $\eta _S$= S r$_I$ whith D$^ \infty$$_{IS}$ the diffusion coefficient of a solute I infinitely diluted, k the Boltzmann constant, T the temperature, r$_I$ the ionic radius and $\eta _S$ the viscosity of the solvent. The effective diffusion coefficient of solutes in porous media is linked to the diffusion coefficient in free-water, porosity, tortuosity and constrictivity. Moreover, the effective diffusion coefficients of halides are reduced by anionic exclusion. In compacted clays, the physical properties of the interstitial water is strongly affected by liquid-solid interfaces. As a matter of facts, the use of Stokes-Einstein law in order to evaluate the effect of temperature on diffusion coefficients in such media is questionable

Experimental and numerical investigation of PWR Tube Support Plate (TSP) clogging formation mechanisms

International audienceCorrosion product deposits in the secondary side of PWR Steam Generators (SG) may result in Tube Support Plate (TSP) clogging majorly composed of magnetite (Fe3O4), which can lead to heavy consequences for nuclear reactor operation and safety issues such as primary-to-secondary leaks. It appears that TSP clogging is mainly driven by magnetite particle deposition and iron precipitation, which can be strengthened by flashing and electrokinetics mechanisms under the specific TSP geometric configuration. TSP clogging formation involves thus complex thermohydraulic, physical and chemical processes while the contribution of each phenomenon and the influence of operating conditions such as secondary fluid velocity, pH and temperature on TSP clogging are still unheralded. COLENTEC two-phase flow loop tests in 2015 provided the first representative experimental results of TSP clogging build-up and showed deposit growth rate in accordance with French power plant feedbacks. Numerical calculations showed the electrokinetics may play a predominant role in TSP clogging formation whereas no significant contribution of magnetite particle deposition occurs provided that the size of magnetite particles is close to 1 µm and the total iron concentration is less than 1 ppm

A review on clogging of recirculating steam generators in Pressurized-Water Reactors

International audienceCorrosion product deposits in the secondary side of nuclear power plant steam generators may result in Tube Support Plate (TSP) clogging and tube fouling. Magnetite has an inverse solubility above 150C, which favours iron precipitation when temperature increases. Flashing and electrokinetics are two strengthening processes for precipitation in TSP clogging. Surface chemistry of magnetite particles was discussed to understand its' interaction with TSP. Particle deposition by boiling was identified as the limiting process by performing numerical applications with nominal conditions. Guidelines drawn from this review for investigating specifically TSP clogging consist on conducting representative condition experiments and electrokinetics investigations

HTO and 36Cl- diffusion in Callovo-Oxfordian argillites and Oxfordian limestones

Communications Orales

Comparison of mass transfer coefficient approach and Nernst−Planck formulation in the reactive transport modeling of Co, Ni, and Ag removal by mixed-bed ion-exchange resins

International audienceExperiments performed under chemical and flow conditions representative of pressurized water reactors (PWR) primary fluid purification by ion exchange resins (Amberlite IRN9882) are modeled with the OPTIPUR code, considering 1D reactive transport in the mixed-bed column with convective/dispersive transport between beads and electrodiffusive transport within the boundary film around the beads. The effectiveness of the purification in these dilute conditions is highly related to film mass transfer restrictions, which are accounted for by adjustment of a common mass transfer coefficient (MTC) on the experimental initial leakage or modeling of species diffusion through the bead film by the Nernst−Planck equation. A detailed analysis of the modeling against experimental data shows that the Nernst−Planck approach with no adjustable parameters performs as well as, or better than, the MTC approach, particularly to simulate the chromatographic elution of silver by nickel and the subsequent enrichment of the solution in the former metal