Perspectives About Personalization for mHealth Solutions Against Noise Pollution.

Noise harms the environmental quality and can have negative effect on health and wellbeing. Providing silent areas and periods of rest is one way to improve the perceived environmental quality. However, realization is not easy in the day to day life.

Personal Portable Devices in the Light of the Internet of Things.

Personal portable devices have already gained their position in health services. However, mobile technologies and Internet of Things open new areas of applications. The possibility to collect many data types continuously over long time intervals brings various questions that must be answered in the design process.

Extension and evaluation of a near-end listening enhancement algorithm for listeners with normal and impaired hearing.

In many applications in which speech is played back via a sound reinforcement system such as public address systems and mobile phones, speech intelligibility is degraded by additive environmental noise. A possible solution to maintain high intelligibility in noise is to pre-process the speech signal based on the estimated noise power at the position of the listener. The previously proposed AdaptDRC algorithm [Schepker, Rennies, and Doclo (2015).

Automated face detection for occurrence and occupancy estimation in chimpanzees.

Unlabelled: Surveying endangered species is necessary to evaluate conservation effectiveness. Camera trapping and biometric computer vision are recent technological advances. They have impacted on the methods applicable to field surveys and these methods have gained significant momentum over the last decade.

Perceived listening effort and speech intelligibility in reverberation and noise for hearing-impaired listeners.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to assess perceived listening effort and speech intelligibility in reverberant and noisy conditions for hearing-impaired listeners for conditions that are similar according to the speech transmission index (STI).

Design: Scaled listening effort was measured in four different conditions at five different STI generated using various relative contributions of noise and reverberant interferences. Intelligibility was measured for a subset of conditions.

Non-technical Issues in Design and Development of Personal Portable Devices.

Mobile technologies are constantly evolving and with the development of Internet of Things we can expect continuous increase of various applications. Mobile technologies have undeniable opportunities to play an important role in health services. Concerning purely technical aspects, almost every problem can be solved.

Speech-in-noise enhancement using amplification and dynamic range compression controlled by the speech intelligibility index.

In many speech communication applications, such as public address systems, speech is degraded by additive noise, leading to reduced speech intelligibility. In this paper a pre-processing algorithm is proposed that is capable of increasing speech intelligibility under an equal-power constraint. The proposed AdaptDRC algorithm comprises two time- and frequency-dependent stages, i.

Privacy Management and Networked PPD Systems - Challenges Solutions.

Modern personal portable health devices (PPDs) become increasingly part of a larger, inhomogeneous information system. Information collected by sensors are stored and processed in global clouds. Services are often free of charge, but at the same time service providers' business model is based on the disclosure of users' intimate health information.

Listening effort and speech intelligibility in listening situations affected by noise and reverberation.

This study compared the combined effect of noise and reverberation on listening effort and speech intelligibility to predictions of the speech transmission index (STI). Listening effort was measured in normal-hearing subjects using a scaling procedure. Speech intelligibility scores were measured in the same subjects and conditions: (a) Speech-shaped noise as the only interfering factor, (b) + (c) fixed signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of 0 or 7 dB and reverberation as detrimental factors, and (d) reverberation as the only detrimental factor.

Modeling the effects of a single reflection on binaural speech intelligibility.

Recently the influence of delay and azimuth of a single speech reflection on speech reception thresholds (SRTs) was systematically investigated using frontal, diffuse, and lateral noise [Warzybok et al. (2013). J.

Personal portable devices as enablers for advanced pHealth decision support and decision making services.

Mobile devices are becoming more and more important for services offered either directly to individuals, or indirectly as part of a therapeutic or rehabilitation procedure. Representing the work of the EFMI WG "Personal Portable Devices", this paper offers an introduction to some of the most important technical and privacy-related challenges that arise when introducing mobile sensor or actuator devices (and networks) into health care, wellness, and fitness processes in order to exploit their capability to collect, record and process personal health data. Data processing can be viewed in three classes of application, namely processes for recommendations, decision support and decision making in personalized health and wellbeing service provision.

The use of exer-learning games for rehabilitation in spa clinics at home.

This paper examines benefits of the exer-learning concept HOPSCOTCH for rehabilitation in spa clinics and at home. It describes a specific application to motivate obese patients in spa clinics for exercise. Furthermore results of an empirical study are reported where HOPSCOTCH was implemented in two spa clinics for a period of four weeks.

Prediction of the influence of reverberation on binaural speech intelligibility in noise and in quiet.

Reverberation usually degrades speech intelligibility for spatially separated speech and noise sources since spatial unmasking is reduced and late reflections decrease the fidelity of the received speech signal. The latter effect could not satisfactorily be predicted by a recently presented binaural speech intelligibility model [Beutelmann et al. (2010).