Audio Notification Research Articles

A moving context-aware and location-based paratransit system

In recent years, paratransit services have been a crucial development for serving people with disabilities. However, the operators face difficulties in efficiently monitoring a paratransit vehicle and passengers are difficult to know the arrival status of the vehicle. This study proposes a moving context-aware and location-based paratransit system. With the support of WAVE/DSRC vehicular communication systems and internet access, our system can integrate the paratransit operator centre, paratransit vehicle and passenger to provide real-time services. Moving context analysis is performed to evaluate the impact of gender, device size and the ways to hold the device and the results are integrated into the development of our prototype system. Visual and audio notification services can be provided adaptively to a passenger based on the behaviour state of the passenger and the location of the paratransit.

Non-intrusive audio notification in emotion classified background music.

In human-computer interaction, audio signals are generally used for warnings and acoustic feedback. Especially in environments with many people, such signals often affect intrusively and distractive because of their differentness compared to the natural sound environment. In this paper, a novel audio notification system is presented that provides methods to notify persons individually in multi-user environments. The used audio cues are unnoticeable for others since they can be embedded seamlessly in ambient background music. A novel notification hierarchy with three signal classes is introduced to realize a personalized and a context-aware notification within the background music. For the self-composed background music, perceptual constraints such as auditive Gestalt laws as well as results from musicology were taken into account to influence the listeners perception. A classification model for the emotional expression of non-vocal music is also introduced in this paper. The effectiveness of the novel notification method and the plausibility of the classification model are confirmed by empirical studies. This novel non-intrusive audio notification method let users become aware of individual events while at the same time other present persons will not get distracted by the notification.

Smart sound environments: merging intentional soundscapes, nonspeech audio cues and ambient intelligence

We introduce an intelligent audio notification system for multiuser environments that provides users with information about events (e.g., important emails) in a more discreet and non-distracting way. The peripheral awareness of individual-related events is done by using nonspeech audio cues which can be seamlessly integrated into artificial background soundscapes. These ambient soundscapes are self-composed with respect to well-known perceptual constraints such as auditive Gestalt laws as well as music psychological findings. To follow a hierarchical approach for the notification sounds we use notification instruments, ambient noises and traditional alert signals that are grouped by their level of intrusiveness. Since the notification system also follows a human-centered approach it takes parameters like user preferences, his/her current position in the environment and the type of event into consideration to decide which notification is the appropriate at this time. In the paper, we will describe the architecture of the personalized ambient audio notification service, compositional constraints as well as some findings of a user study in which we tested successfully the efficiency of our system with 25 subjects.

A Support System for Context Awareness in a Group Home Using Sound Cues

In a group home, caregivers should be aware of the inhabitant's real-time situation. The aim of our study is to facilitate the awareness of an inhabitant's situation by means of enhanced sound cues. We propose an audio notification system that indicates the real-time situation of persons in a group home environment using sound cues instead of visual surveillance. The notification system comprises a prediction and a notification function. The prediction function estimates a person's real-time situation using a Bayesian network and sensed information; the notification function informs recipients of the predicted situation and the confidence level of the prediction by means of sound cues. We use natural sounds as sound cues. As a first step to examine our system in a group home, we conducted operation and performance tests of each unit under a simple test environment. The correct prediction of the subject's situation is approximately 90%; further, it is shown that the sound cues should be selected according to their environmental dependence. The results show that the method is useful for monitoring persons. As future study, we will conduct a field test on an implemented system and improve it for practical use in a group home.