Generic Implementation of a Distress Sound Extraction System for Elder Care

Medical remote monitoring at home is an alternative to improve the patient´s comfort, to detect distress situation rapidly and reduce hospitalization costs. Physiologic and position sensors give already numerous information, but sound classification can give interesting additional information. A real-time implementation of a smart sound system capable of detecting and identifying sound events in noisy conditions is presented in this paper. The advantage of this implementation is the use of a generic PC station: the hardware requirements are only a sound card, a microphone and an Internet link used to transmit alarm. In the case of an alarm, the information can be sent through network to a remote monitoring center and/or to a close person by email or SMS. The system is composed of 2 modules: detection and classification. The event detection module is carried out in real time in order to extract possible alarm sounds. The sound classification module is runs in a parallel task; it carries out a first segmentation between sound and speech. In the speech case, a speech recognition system is launched (not described in this paper) and in the sound case, a classification between predefined classes is carried out