Design and Development of a Voice-Assistant for the Mauritian Elderly

For the last decennium, smart home systems have been integrated to provide a better living experience for the human's day-to-day activities using, smart sensors, smartphones, smart devices, and computers. Globally, interaction and communication with the existing voice assistants like Alexa®, Google Nest®, and Siri® are available only in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Hindi. Generally, in Mauritius, Amazon Alexa®, Google Nest®, and Siri® are available in English and French language which most people especially seniors have trouble using as they require more training to use these voice assistants. Despite all the impeccable technological advancement in the field of voice assistant, there is still a lack of age-related technology development that could cater to vulnerable people such as seniors and disabled people. Design considerations could include age-related design emphasising the section of the house where the seniors spend most of their time, which generally is the kitchen. Therefore, this paper presents the design and development of a voice control system named Eddy, devised to control any connected kitchen appliances using the Mauritian Creole language. The main objective of this conceptual design was to establish a voice recognition system that could be used by Mauritian seniors where executable voice commands are fed to an Arduino microcontroller and display the recent command using an LCD and voiceover feedback in Mauritian Creole language The smart system is comprised of an Arduino ATmega2S60 microcontroller, TIP120 transistor, Micro SD card, I2C LCD 16x2 & 20x4, 8 Ohm speakers, 8-channel relay, EasyVR 3 voice recognition module, and Dupont wires.