Smart Audio Sensor for Telemedicine
Michel Vacher, Dan Istrate, Laurent Besacier, Eric Castelli, Jean-François Sérignat · 2003
In order to improve patients’life conditions and to reduce the costs of long hospitalization, medicine is more and more interested in telemonitoring techniques. We develop a smart audio sensor for a telemonitoring system. This sensor is equipped with microphones in order to detect a sound event (an abnormal noise or a call for help). The sound extracted information is send through a CAN bus. The originality of our approach consists in replacing the video camera monitoring, which the patients are uncomfortable with, by microphones surveying the sounds. We present the hardware implementation, the software treatments and a first evaluation of the algorithms used. 2. Sensor description The smart audio sensor contains 8 microphones, 8 signal conditioning boards and a data acquisition board (see the figure 1). For the moment we use only 5 of the 8 available microphones, and the acquisition is made on all the 5 channels simultaneously to allow survey of the entire apartment. 1.