Real Time Acoustic Localization of Elderly Persons in a Smart Home

International audienceDue to the growing number of elderly people during the last decade, new needs came out especially in term of healthcare, resulting in more demand for self-care and home-based services. The emergence of smart technologies and home-based care has made this possible. In fact, smart home technology is designed to provide a place where old people can live independently as they wish by maintaining a control of every aspect of their daily life. Locating an elderly person in his home at any moment is one of the most concerns of smart home designers. The use of acoustic information captured in the smart home is one of the axes that can bring more possibilities in term of localization. This paper focuses on developing a sound source localization system using microphone arrays. Time difference of arrival (TDoA) using correlation technique is used for estimating the delay between two signals captured by two different microphones. The direction of arrival of the sound source can be obtained using this delay. Finally the sound source is positioned by adopting the geometric location method. This system has been tested by a set of experiments and the results are satisfactor