The Sweet-Home project: audio processing and decision making in smart home to improve well-being and reliance.

The Sweet-Home project aims at providing audio-based interaction technology that lets the user have full control over their home environment, at detecting distress situations and at easing the social inclusion of the elderly and frail population. This paper presents an overview of the project focusing on the implemented techniques for speech and sound recognition as context-aware decision making with uncertainty. A user experiment in a smart home demonstrates the interest of this audio-based technology.

The sweet-home project: audio technology in smart homes to improve well-being and reliance.

The Sweet-Home project aims at providing audio-based interaction technology that lets the user have full control over their home environment, at detecting distress situations and at easing the social inclusion of the elderly and frail population. This paper presents an overview of the project focusing on the multimodal sound corpus acquisition and labelling and on the investigated techniques for speech and sound recognition. The user study and the recognition performances show the interest of this audio technology.

On the inefficiency of transmission of Wuchereria bancrofti from mosquito to human host.

The high biting rate of Culex pipiens fatigans in Rangoon, combined with a low prevalence of microfilaraemia due to Wuchereria bancrofti, suggested a poor efficiency of transmission. Data obtained by the WHO Filariasis Research Unit in Rangoon were analysed, and the efficiency of the parasite from Stage III larva in the mosquito to the production of microfilariae was estimated as 6.04-6.

Infection and reinfection of Culex pipiens fatigans with Wuchereria bancrofti and the loss of mature larvae in blood-feeding.

Although previous workers had found no evidence of resistance to superinfection in vectors of filariasis, it was considered desirable to reinvestigate the subject because of the epidemiological implications, since a mosquito that can incubate to maturity successive broods of filarial larvae will obviously be a more efficient vector than one that cannot. The results obtained indicate that a Culex pipiens fatigans mosquito that picks up an infection early in its life can, by taking subsequent infecting feeds, remain infective for the rest of its life.The movement of mature larvae in the vector and losses of larvae during feeding are of interest since from this information one can estimate the probable number of larvae deposited on the host at each feed and the period of infectivity of the vector.