Smart Sound Sensor to Detect the Number of People in a Room.

ABSTRACT

Ambient sound monitoring is a widely used strategy to follow older adults, which could help them achieve healthy ageing with comfort and security. In a previous work, we have already developed a smart audio sensor able to recognize everyday life sounds in order to detect activities of daily living (ADL) and distress situations. In this paper, we propose to add a new functionality by analyzing the speech flow to detect the number of people in a room. The proposed algorithms are based on speaker diarization methods. This information can be used to better detect activities of daily life but also to know when the person is home alone. This functionality can also offer more comfort through light, heating and air conditioning adaptation to the number of people in an environment.