Multichannel Sound Acquisition with Stress Situations Determination for Medical Supervision in a Smart House

Abstract

In order to improve patients’ life conditions and to reduce the costs of long hospitalization, the medicine is more and more interested in the telemonitoring techniques. These will allow the old people or the high risk patients to stay at home and to benefit from a remote and automatic medical supervision. We develop in collaboration with TIMC-IMAG laboratory, a system of telemonitoring in a habitat equipped with physiological sensors, position encoders of the person and microphones. The originality of our approach consists in replacing the video camera monitoring, hardly accepted by the patients, by microphones recording the sounds (speech or noises) in the apartment. The microphones carry out a multichannel sound acquisition system which, thanks to the sound information coupled with physical information, will enable us to identify a situation of distress. We describe the practical solutions chosen for the acquisition system and the recorded corpus of situations.