Assisted Living - Comfort Words

[ndh]

As part of moving Comfort into the Assisted Living market I would like to discover if there is any expertise within the forum in this area and in particular if any of you can recommend words that could be added to a special vocabulary for Comfort?

e.g.

• Take
  
• Pill
  
• Medicine
  
• Press
  
• Blue
  
• Button
  
• Ok

You don\'t have to be an expert to suggest though; maybe you can visualise situations in your own or associates experience.
We are overdue to record a new UK / English  Comfort voice and would like to record these words at the same time. So the quicker we can do this the better.

Please also start any new Topics related to assisted living.

Nigel

[garym999]

Part of me thinks you will never have the right words to suit everybody. Ultimately it would be better if Comfort were to review how sound and voice synthesis is implemented. In this day and age it seems far more appropriate that warning sounds and reminders are MP3 based and can be uploaded and downloaded.

On the voice side some form of text to speech engine may be the best approach. In the simplest form a serial UCM driving a serial card may work. The top of the range TomTom\'s use this method of speech generation. I guess processing grunt is the issue here. Loquendo are the bods that supply Tomtom. There are some good examples that show the power of the this now and some nice voices.

The other area for assisted living are the communication interfaces, for someone wheelchair bound it would need to be mobile for example. eg: those with limited movement would need some form of nudge, bump, blow, suck controller. Possum is a well known brand in this arena.


One nice example well within Comforts capability, is something that the NHS is doing in some places. Calling you on your mobile to remind you to take your pills!

[ndh]

We are moving forward a little in this area. Please update when you have some news of anything new of interest.

Nigel

[Ian Whalley]

One area we also need to look at here is for people that are deaf,
maybe  a device like a mobile phone which vibrates to alert them
to do somthing with comfort.
Will have a good think about words which you could use.
Ian

[ndh]

Thanks Ian,

I have a small RS232 single line display (kit) here to test sometime, but a large rolling led display might be worth testing (and would also be eye catching generally for shows).

So yes something vibrating so you check a display of some sort might work. It could be continuously rolling low importance information.

Guess we should not reinvent though if the experts know how best this should all work. Do ask ifand when you get an opportunity.

With the words we should go for a superset as they could then be mixed into different vocabularies. 

Nigel


Update see : http://www.easylinkuk.co.uk/page17.html

 

[Ian Whalley]

A simple list of words for use with comfort for assisted living, any more ideas.



Ian



[color=\"blue\"]Farther             Water[/color]
[color=\"blue\"]Mother            Tap[/color]
[color=\"blue\"]Ring                Stove[/color]
[color=\"blue\"]Call                  Gas[/color]
[color=\"blue\"]Remember       Lock[/color]
[color=\"blue\"]Son                  Time[/color]
[color=\"blue\"]Daughter         TV[/color]
[color=\"blue\"]Doctor             Anniversary[/color]
[color=\"blue\"]Birthday          House[/color]
[color=\"blue\"]Carer               Alarm[/color]
[color=\"blue\"]Keys                Window[/color]

[garym999]

For versitility Comfort III! should perhaps drop hard coded phrases in favour of TTS as I have mentioned before.

A quick google has found this and would no longer mean that comfort is restricted to specific words. This would work now save the fact that it communicates at 2400 baud as opposed to Comforts 9600.

[Ian Whalley]

Gary,
that would perfect, you could create the speach to match each clients needs.
Ian

[ndh]

But that\'s a couple of years away .... probably

Thanks for the words.  Any other takers please?

[garym999]

Sure a fully intergrated Comfort III is a way off but it could be here now if we can find a module that will communicate with a UCM RS232 @ 9600 baud.