An Anytime Voice Controlled Ambient Assisted Living System for motion disabled persons

Home surveillance systems, intelligent or smart homes are basically built to monitor and support ill and/or disabled persons in their independent living, possibly as part of the medical attendance. Intelligent Space or iSpace is a new kind of computing system aiming at improving the environments of humans, creating a natural and easy to use solution. From this two concepts a new family of applications, the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems have grown. This paper presents an Anytime Voice Controlled Ambient Assisted Living System developed for a highly motion disabled person. The equipment and fixtures of the living environment of the lady can be controlled by a limited set of voice commands. The system applies a new anytime speech recognition algorithm by executing interruptible speech analyzer modules in order to determine the most probable instruction. The analysis is executed with high reliability in a far off optimal acoustic environment (continuously varying, distorted speech of the user, loud background noise containing human speech, etc.).