Vocalife line: a voice-operated device and system for saving lives in medical emergency

• US 20070057798A1
• Filed: 09/09/2005
• Published: 03/15/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 09/09/2005
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Joy Li, Lili Yan, Qi Li
• Original Assignee: Joy Li, Lili Yan, Qi Li
• Inventors: Li, Qi, Li, Joy, Yan, Lili
• Application Number:
  US11/223,490
• Publication Number:
  US 20070057798A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 340/573.100
• CPC Class Codes: G08B 21/023 Power management, e.g. system sleep and wake up provisions
• CPC Class Codes: G08B 25/016 Personal emergency signalling and security systems emergency non-personal manually actuated alarm activators G08B25/12

Abstract

The invention, a voice-operated alarm system, includes an alarm and a receiver. The alarm is comprised of a microphone unit, a voice detector, a noise reduction unit, a speech recognizer or a keyword spotter which can recognize predefined keywords, and a signal transmitter. The speech recognizer and the keyword spotter can be speaker dependent, speaker independent, or both. A speaker-dependent system needs training, while a speaker-independent system does not. A receiver is located near the alarm and is connected to a telephone or data network. The receiver further communicates with the emergency monitoring center. Furthermore, the alarm system can also be implemented as a wireless phone with keyword spotting/recognition function. In this embodiment, the alarm user can communicate with the operators directly, like a cell phone, but the dial up function is replaced by uttering keywords. In this implementation, the receiver may not be necessary.

Claims

1. A system for communications in a medical emergency situations between a user and a monitoring center comprising:

a voice-operated device that can recognize predetermined voice keywords uttered by the user then wirelessly sends predetermined emergency signals out;

a receiver to receive the emergency signals from the voice-operated device; and

through a telephone or a data network, the receiver will sends a emergency call to the monitoring center.

2. The system as claimed in claim 1, wherein the user utters the predetermined keyword(s) by the user'"'"'s own voice to active the voice-operated device.

3. The system as claimed as claim 1, wherein the predetermined keyword(s) can be spoken by any person to active the device.

4. The system as claimed in claim 1, wherein the receiver can be a wireless station located next to the voice-operated device as the base of a cordless phone, where the voice-operated device can be a wireless phone dialed by uttering the keywords.

7. The device as claimed in claim 4, wherein further comprising an optional key that can be pushed by a user to send out the wireless emergency signals.

8. The device as claimed in claim 4, wherein the microphone unit is a microphone or a microphone array comprised of more than one microphone component.

9. The device as claimed in claim 4, wherein the signal processor further comprising:

a plurality of preamplifiers, where each preamplifier has a corresponding voice signal channel, amplifying analog signals received from microphone unit;

an analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) to convert the received analogue signal into a digital signal;

a voice detector to detect voices from silence and to trigger speech signal processing;

an array signal unit to improve signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and to convert received multiple-channel signals into single-channel signals;

a noise-reduction and speech enhancement unit to further improve the single-channel SNR; and

a keyword-spotting unit to spot and recognize the keywords from received signals.

10. The device as claimed in claim 4, wherein the signal processor can be implemented by one semiconductor chip or more than one chips.

11. The array signal unit as claimed in claim 7, wherein further implementing an array signal processing algorithm, such as a delay-and-sum algorithm, a filter-and-sum algorithm, a linear algorithm, or a nonlinear algorithm.

12. The array signal unit as claimed in claim 9, wherein the nonlinear algorithm further including one or more nonlinear functions, such as a sigmoid function.

13. The signal processor as claimed in claim 7, wherein the noise reduction and speech enhancement unit further implementing a Weiner filter algorithm or a spectral subtraction algorithm or any noise reduction to further reduce noise and enhance speech of the signals.

14. The signal processor as claimed in claim 7, wherein the noise reduction and speech enhancement unit further implementing an auditory-based algorithm to further reduce noise and enhance the speech of the signals.

15. The signal processor as claimed in claim 7, wherein the keyword-spotting unit further comprising:

a feature extracting unit to convert time-domain speech signals into frequency-domain feature vectors for recognition;

acoustic models representing phonemes, sub-words, keywords, and key-phrases which need to be spotted;

a garbage model representing all other acoustic sounds or units; and

and a decoder that can distinguish keywords or commands from voice signals through searching and using the models.

16. The signal processor as claimed in claim 7, wherein the keyword-spotting unit further comprising:

a feature extracting unit to convert time-domain speech signals into frequency-domain feature vectors for recognition;

a language model to model the statistical property of spoken languages to help in search and decoding;

a set of acoustic models to model acoustic units;

phonemes, sub-words, words, or spoken phrases, where the model can be a hidden Markov model or a Gaussian mixture model to model the statistical property; and

a decoder to convert a sequence of speech features into a sequence of acoustic units by searching, and then mapping the recognized acoustic units to keywords, text, or control signals.

17. The signal processor as claimed in claim 7, wherein the keyword-spotting unit can be a speech recognizer that recognizes the keyword automatically.

5. A voice-operated device used for calling a monitoring center at a medical emergency comprising:

18. The voice-operated device as claimed in claim 5, wherein the transmitter sends out the same predetermined emergency signals either invoked by pushing the key or by uttering keyword(s).

6. a microphone unit for receiving voice input;

a signal microprocessor to process the received voice input;

a plurality of memories comprised of RAM and ROM;

a radio-frequency transmitter to send out a plurality of predetermined wireless signals;

a battery power source; and

upon receiving a recognized predetermined voice keyword, the device automatically sends out a plurality of predetermined wireless emergency signals.