Work package 2: Dissemination and Exploitation
The current status of the dissemination activities is as follows:
All the partners are involved in the dissemination activities. The main tasks of the first six months focused on the establishment of basic but important dissemination and exploitation objectives for further dissemination and exploitation activities in the future. The project web site has been established to provide public access of project information (objectives, partners, scope, etc.) as well as internal partner information on the status quo of the project. While the project members contributed industry contacts to be contacted for further dissemination activities, a questionnaire and a flyer were created and sent out to the specified contacts afterwards. First press releases and presentations by members have also contributed to the establishment of the HaH project in the public.
After ongoing dissemination and exploitation activities during the first six months and the evaluation of the questionnaire feedback the group decided to continue with its related activities and to redistribute the man power of work package 2. This redistribution has guaranteed efficient support for ongoing marketing activities also prior to M13. It included activities like PR support, an update and extension of the project web site and collateral updates as well as the further collection of industry contact and event information. In addition, the work on a newsletter has been started and the external messaging was made fully consistent by the creation and posting of a slide deck pool at the internal web site. This messaging has been used by the project partners for presentations and other activities at events and other web sites and has helped to foster the interest in the project activities and its future results.
Over the first year the HaH project already has seen an increasing interest by the industry. The project objectives and goals have raised the awareness and interest especially by service providers for future business cases. This is good news since service providers are the push factor for a growing interest by additional STB manufacturers and other manufacturers of the food-chain. This interest will be fostered by the regular distribution of the bi-annual newsletter, starting in February 2008, and the increase of other marketing activities in the upcoming months of the project.
The HaH project was presented at various events and also attended (for its third time) the concertation meeting in Brussels where we presented the upcoming workshop in Madrid (2007-12-14). On this workshop the projects ASTRALS and HaH tried to figure out, how the results from ASTRALS can be used in HaH. The ASTRALS project ends at the beginning of 2008, so that different technologies (home automation and A/V delivery) exist which propose to enhance the HaH HIC platform. (For further information please go to URL to WP2 deliverables)
Work package 3: User Requirement Study
Task T3.1:"Definition of User Needs" was started at the beginning of the project. Structured interviews were carried out in Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands with in total more than 60 target users to find out more about their need for assistive hearing applications in their home environment. An important conclusion is that most interviewees had a positive opinion about the HaH technology and the usefulness of the envisioned applications.
In April, D3.1, covering the interviews with persons from the target group, was completed. The results formed the input for focus group discussions in which the potential HaH applications were thoroughly discussed in a number of typical use case scenarios. In Germany, Sweden and The Netherlands two focus groups participated in each country: one with persons without a hearing aid, one with persons with a hearing aid. Both the interview results and the outcomes of the discussions formed the input for the final stage of this workpackage: the definition of applications. This definition was completed in a series of discussions during the consortium meeting in Stockholm, in the end of May. A clear list of applications to be included in the HaH system was delivered. At the end of May, D3.2 and D3.3 were completed according to plan.
In June, D3.4, the public report on the user requirements studies was completed. This report is a comprehensive description of the deliverables D3.1, D3.2 and D3.3.
Work package 4: HIC Development Platform
The fourth work package is dedicated to set up the initial Home Information and Communication (HIC) platform so that every partner can do further developments on the same technological basis. Therefore this workpackage started at the very beginning of the project. As the results of the user studies (cf. work package 3) also affects the hardware requirements this first development platform is dedicated to provide as much flexibility as possible. At the very end of the project the effort spend in the work package 9 will result in a prototype HIC platform which will be as close to real product as possible.
In fruitful discussions the project partners defined the performance requirements (as far as they could be estimated). The initial HIC development platform is set up using standard PC components consisting of a Intel Core2Duo processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM and a NVIDIA graphics card. Also a DVB card is installed to provide the TV functionality. The decision is to use a Fedora Core6 Linux system with an applied low-latency patch for the kernel (ccrma).
The software interfaces between the already existing software parts (Master Hearing Aid, Synface, Home Automation (based on OSGi – www.osgi.org) were defined. The resulting architecture of the system can be seen in the following picture:
The full system has been specified starting with 15 use cases. Details about the specifications can be found in the respective deliverables, which are summed up in the public deliverable D4.4 which is available on the HaH website.
Work package 5: Synface Enhancements and Adaptations
During the past quarter, work on the Synface system has continued on several fronts. The training of the ANN-system for the German version of the recognizer is progressing. While the training is a lengthy process that requires several months of computation, we expect to see preliminary results that can be used in the prototype system towards the end of the year. The port of Synface to the linux-based HIC-platform now also works with the JACK audio connection kit, which required certain modifications of the SynFace audio subsystem. Furthermore, annotation and analysis of the German motion capture data base that was reported on in deliverable D5.1 Multi-lingual motion capture corpus containing multiple speaking styles, is progressing, which during the next period will be used in experiments with data-driven articulation for the talking head for German. In the mean time, before German articulation models have been produced, a phone-level mapping from German to Swedish phonemes will be established, which allows the Swedish articulatory rules to be used in the prototype.
Viataal has made early installation of new Synface release. Main focus was the preliminary investigation of consequences of using Flemish and Dutch database.
Work package 6: Global SASP Strategies
This work package has started in month 7. The first deliverables, D6.1, “Specification of noise reduction algorithms”, and D6.2, “Specification of classification algorithms” have been completed.
A user study has been performed at HörTech to assess the noise reduction expectations of potential users. Based on the users' feedback, the noise reduction algorithms and the classification algorithms to implement were specified.
Work package 7: Individual SASP Strategies
The individual Supportive Audio Signal Processing (SASP) strategy, which is the research topic in work package 7, addresses the individual hearing loss of the user. Therefore the system will work with an algorithm based on widely used digital hearing aid algorithms. The specification of this algorithm took place in the very beginning of this workpackage after an intensive literature study. The algorithm used in the Hearing at Home HIC platform consists for the iSASP part of an equalizer and a three band dynamic compression scheme, where more than 20 parameters can be adapted (and have to) to cope best the individual needs of the user.
A second (and far more time consuming) research is the self fitting strategy. Within the Hearing at Home project it’s immanent with the addressed users that they can adjust the parameters themselves at home – but of course without any special knowledge or even the help of an acoustician.
The work on this topic is currently ongoing and results will be published in one of the later issues of this newsletter.
Work package 8: Home Automation Interfaces
The activity within this work package has been to evaluate the precise software components that have to be developed to fulfil the needs depicted in the project after the results of workpackage 3 (user studies). A working document describing these componentshas been created. The identified components were:
There are seven tasks defined to synchronise the work of the different project partners supporting the implementation of these components.
During the last period, a working document to clarify the precise tasks to be done within work package 8 has been circulated among the participants. Having this working document as initial version, deliverable D.8.1 has been produced.
D8.1 describes the initial interfaces for the home automation part of the HIC platform. It reflects the results from the user studies and defines the controller structure to support the different home automation interfaces. This is done by several abstraction layers that guarantee that the view of the HIC controller stays the same.
Development environments for these algorithms (Matlab and MHA) have been set up, and research and development of the specified algorithms have started. Most of the algorithms are first implemented in Matlab for easy modification and fast development cycles. For the correlation filter and the single-channel noise reduction, pre-existing MHA modules are being adapted for the noise reduction task in the HIC platform.
As a consequence of user demands discovered in work package 3, the project has incorporated the detection and attenuation of commercial breaks in the TV program into its work plan. Work on a classifier for commercial breaks has started.