project achievements

The project reached the final goal of coming up with an integrated system which supports hearing impaired persons in participating easier in the communication society. The big research effort in noise reduction, partner communication, visual lip reading support, individual fitting of the audio processing for the respective hearing impairment and last but not least the home automation integration which supports hearing impaired in getting noticed by several events like a doorbell ringing.

The project reshaped its work and resulted in an amendment which was granted during the reporting period. The project duration changed to now 32 months, so it ended 2009-07-31. The remaining time of the project was now more focused on research and less integration, the number of deliverables has been drastically reduced, there are more public deliverables and the Business Case derived from the market survey and discussions with potential stakeholders are now clearly focused and are used to guide the research within the workpackages.

The dissemination and exploitation was very active to also shape the business cases further – but from the world economic there is a drawback visible so the project had to work with assumptions on the market situation. E.g. Residential Gateway market is not yet a massmarket and there are not many commertial equipments ready to be used by the telcos. Therefore the project continued this work with the one of one of the RG manufacturers we have contacts with, to come up with a showcase.

Another important focus of this reporting period was completing the user studies, namely the home automation studies, the long term iSASP (individual Supportive Audio Signal Processing) user studies, final Synface studies (as part of WP9), the final gSASP (global Supportive Audio Signal Processing) work and preparation of the final user studies (of WP9). The results of the performed evaluations are very promising: for the home automation studies some improvements could be learned, the LTUS showed that the acclimatization process is not the way expected but the first fitting already is a very good one and the final user studies show that the overall subjective impression of the test users is a very good one. For the gSASP and Synface user tests it’s obvious that these approaches have several disadvantages, but fit very well for specific needs and circumstances.

For further results, please click here:

The 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:

events

Publication

Activity

Studies on Using the SynFace Talking Head for the Hearing Impaired

Authors

Al Moubayed, S.; Beskow, J.; Öster, A-M.; Salvi, G.; Granström, B.; van Son, N.; Ormel, E

Where

To be published in Fonetik'09. Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Sweden, 2009

Activity

Eine Multimediazentrale als Hörunterstützung im häuslichen Umfeld

Authors

Schulz, A.; Baumgartner, H.; Müller, F.; Hein, A

Where

to appear in GI Tagung, Lübeck, Germany, 2009

Activity

Mushy Peek -A framework for online investigation of audiovisual dialogue phenomena

Authors

Edlund, J., Beskow, J

Where

In press: Language and Speech

Activity

Visualization of speech and audio for hearing impaired persons

Authors

Beskow, J., Engwall, O., Granström, B., Nordqvist, P., Wik, P

Where

Technology and Disability 20,(2), pp. 97-107

Activity

Supporting hearing impaired citizens in their home environment

Authors

Schulz, A., Huber, R., Beskow, J., Ibáñez Lequerica, M., Ormel, E., Hein, A.

Where

to appear in proceedings of NEM summit 2009

Optimized for 1024 x 768 - HaH (IST-045089) is an Information Society Technologies (IST)STREP project co-funded under EU's sixth framework (FP6), that addresss the strategic objective of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) for the Ageing Society. © 2009