HABITAT TELEMONITORING SYSTEM BASED ON THE SOUND SURVEILLANCE

Abstract

International audienceThis paper presents a telemonitoring system in an habitat equipped with physiological sensors, position encoders of the person, and microphones. The originality of our approach consists in replacing the video camera monitoring, not well accepted by the patients, with microphones acquiring the sounds. The sounds are analyzed and not stored in order to maintain the person privacy. We present the entire telemonitoring system which makes the data fusion between medical information and sound information and particulary the sound processing algorithms to detect a distress situation. The first step of sound processing is the sound event detection in a noisy everyday life environment. Sound event detection is necessary to extract the significant sounds before initiating the classification step. Sound classification system and its performances are presented in this paper, too. Introduction Medical monitoring is more and more frequently used in order to reduce hospitalisation costs. There are many researches in telemedicine, but few of them are sound based. In this paper, we present a medical telemonitoring system with a smart audio sensor. The system we work on is designed for the surveillance of the elderly, convalescent persons or pregnant women [1]. Its main goal is to detect serious accidents as falls or faintness at any place in the apartment. It was noted that the elderly had difficulties in accepting the video camera monitoring, considering it a violation of their privacy. Thus, the originality of our approach consists in replacing the video camera by a system of multichannel sound acquisition. The system analyzes in real time the sound environment of the apartment and detects the abnormal sounds (falls of objects or patient) and the calls for help, that could indicate a distress situation in the habitat. Again, to respect privacy, no continuous recording or storage of the sound is made, since only the last 5s of the audio signal are kept in a buffer and sent to the alarm monitor if a sound event is detected. The sound information extractio