Sound, Vibration Recognition Boost Context-Aware Computing

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Smart devices can seem dumb if they don't understand where they are or what people around them are doing. Carnegie Mellon University researchers say this environmental awareness can be enhanced by complementary methods for analyzing sound and vibrations.

"A smart speaker sitting on a kitchen countertop cannot figure out if it is in a kitchen, let alone know what a person is doing in a kitchen," said Chris Harrison, assistant professor in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). "But if these devices understood what was happening around them, they could be much more helpful."

Harrison and colleagues in the Future Interfaces Group will report today at the Association for Computing Machinery's User Interface Software and Technology Symposium in Berlin about two approaches to this problem — one that uses the most ubiquitous of sensors, the microphone, and another that employs a modern-day version of eavesdropping technology used by the KGB in the 1950s.

In the first case, the researchers have sought to develop a sound-based activity recognition system, called Ubicoustics. This system would use the existing microphones in smart speakers, smartphones and smartwatches, enabling them to recognize sounds associated with places, such as bedrooms, kitchens, workshops, entrances and offices.

"The main idea here is to leverage the professional sound-effect libraries typically used in the entertainment industry," said Gierad Laput, a Ph.D. student in HCII. "They are clean, properly labeled, well-segmented and diverse. Plus, we can transform and project them into hundreds of different variations, creating volumes of data perfect for training deep-learning models.

"This system could be deployed to an existing device as a software update and work immediately," he added.