Key note on residential gateways
The Residential Gateway is aimed to be the main element within the new services ecosystem at home. Telcos don’t want to be just the owner of the carrier but also the provider of those services that use this carrier. Telcos can either offer services themselves or create alliances with other third parties to offer them together. In order to be able to play this new role, Telcos need a new box at home, the evolution of the current routers with an appropriate middleware that allows the deployment of services: the residential gateway.
This new box, has to be easy to maintain so as not to increase the costs. Therefore, residential gateways will include utilities to enable remote management, remote deployment and update of services.
The services developed within H@H project could be an example of the services that could be offered to the end user as part of the portfolio of the Telco. A third party such as a hearing assistive company could be the service provider of the self-fitting tool for the hearing aids, and a home automation company the service provider of the home automation facilities of H@H. Both services would be deployed in the Residential Gateway. All services will co-exist in the same environment and could even collaborate with each other.
Fernando Farcía Calvo, Digital Home Area Manager, Telefónica I+D
project achievements
In the first newsletter we described our work on the user requirement studies and the technical basis for our research, the development HIC platform.
See first newsletterThe ongoing work then was mainly dedicated to the scientific workpackages 5-8, where big improvements have been made. These developments took place on the initially defined HIC platform to ease the integration into one demonstrator to the end of the project. And of course this ensures the reliable transfer of results from one partner to the other so that the interaction can be as smooth as possible.
The research concentrated on four topics: SynFace, iSASP, gSASP and Home Automation. For Synface research has been performed focused on the broadband recognizer which was newly developed and the adaptation of different languages in the database. The gSASP (global Supportive Audio Signal Processing), which addresses improvements of speech intelligibility indepent from the specific hearing loss, continued the research work on noise reduction, which then also were evaluated with extensive user studies. Helping hearing impaired users with a specific adaptation of the audio signal (for the specific hearing loss) has been addressed in the iSASP (individual Supportive Audio Signal Processing) workpackage. Starting from a very well known hearing aid algorithm (based on three band dynamic compression) the self fitting of an inexperienced user without any professional help has been evolved and widely tested in user studies. For the home automation part on the one hand an integration of existing technology (like EHS and EIB) into the HIC platform have been performed, but also an user interaction (especially for elderly hearing impaired) have been established. Further a full framework for easy adding devices to the system based on the MBCS (Model Based Controller System) SOA approach has been invented and established.
A project with research topics so close to the actual needs of hearing impaired persons naturally (and possible products addressing these needs) has a special emphasis to dissemination and exploitation. Therefore the project is very well visible on scientific conferences in the different fields (speech, acoustics, TV, Home Automation, AAL) but also in direct contact with potential commercialisation partners (e.g. Telecommunication industry) and on exhibitions (like CeBIT). We also used our potential in addressing directly the Residential Expert Group of the OSGi consortium and used the various feedbacks to come up with two very promising Business Cases for a possible product. Both Business Cases will be followed up till the end of the project (2009-07-31) and underlined with several small feasibility-studies
For further results, please click here:
Go to Work packages ResultsThe work developed within the HaH project has been presented at several conferences and events, and in papers. Just a sample of these activities are listed below. For getting the complete list of activities please click here:
Go to full list of activitiesevents
- Event
- Present first user test results for iSASP
- When
- April 1-3, 2009(London)
- Where
- 3rd International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare 2009
- Event
- Show SOA approach of the Hearing at Home project which will be presented there
- When
- May 26-29, 2009, Bradford, UK
- Where
- IEEE SOCNE09 4th International IEEE Workshop on Service Oriented Architectures in Converging Networked Environments
- Event
- Show wizard concept of iSASP and present results of gSASP workpackage
- When
- March 23-26, 2009, Rotterdam, NL
- Where
- NAG/DAGA 2009
publications
- Activity
- Visualization of speech and audio for hearing impaired persons. Technology and Disability. 20 (2) pp. 97-107.
- Authors
- Beskow, J., Engwall, O., Granström, B., Nordqvist, P. and Wik, P
- Date
- June 2008
- Activity
- Improving Accessibility: Supportive Technologies for the Hearing Impaired on a Set-Top Box, EuroITV 2008 in Salzburg
- Authors
- Schulz, A.; Herzke, T.; Ibáñez, M.; Beskow, J.; Hein, A
- Date
- July 3-4,2008
- Activity
- Hearing at Home – Communication support in home environments for hearing impaired persons.
- Authors
- Beskow, J., Granström, B., Nordqvist, P., Al Moubayed S., Salvi, G., Herzke, T., & Schulz, A
- Date
- September, 2008
- Activity
- Mobile Synface: Ubiquitous visual interface for mobile VoIP telephone calls,SCLT 2008, Swedish Conference on Language Technology 2008.
- Authors
- Lopez, F. & Beskow, J.: (2008):
- Date
- November 20 - 21, 2008