NASA SBIR 2008 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
WEVOICE, Inc.
9 Sylvan Drive
Bridgewater, NJ 08807 - 2235
(908) 575-8955

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Yiteng (Arden) Huang
ardenhuang@gmail.com
9 Sylvan Drive
Bridgewater, NJ 08807 - 2235
(908) 575-8955

Expected Technology Readiness Level (TRL) upon completion of contract: 5 to 6

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
Astronauts suffer from poor dexterity of their hands due to the clumsy
spacesuit gloves during Extravehicular Activity (EVA) operations and
NASA has had a widely recognized but unmet need for novel human machine
interface technologies to facilitate data entry, communications, and
robots or intelligent systems control. In this proposed Phase I research,
WeVoice, Inc., plans to design, to begin the implementation of, and to
evaluate a speech human interface system. Loud noise and strong
reverberation inside spacesuits make automatic speech recognition (ASR)
for such an interface a very challenging problem. WeVoice proprietary
microphone array signal processing algorithms for speech acquisition
will be taken advantage of. Pros and cons of beamforming vs.
multichannel noise reduction for ASR will be assessed and
recommendations for the best front-end technique will be established.
Using two ASR programs (one based on HTK and the other in C/C++)
that were previously developed at WeVoice, Inc., a number of robust
methods (ranging from feature transformation and normalization to
environmental adaptation) will be validated. In addition, the
feasibility of using throat vibration microphones will be explored.
The Phase I research is also concerned with the compromise of
ASR accuracy and system complexity. A comparative study will be
undertaken between two system implementation structures,
namely wearable and distributed systems. This effort
will form a foundation for prototype design to be
conducted in Phase II.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
A practical speech human interface will find a number of potential NASA commercial applications:
1. Astronaut data entry systems
2. Spacesuit integrated intelligient systems
3. In-helmet voice communication

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
1. Speech-driven intelligient systems used in military and other noisy environments.
2. Information and computer systems used by disabled persons or people with poor manual dexterity.

NASA's technology taxonomy has been developed by the SBIR-STTR program to disseminate awareness of proposed and awarded R/R&D in the agency. It is a listing of over 100 technologies, sorted into broad categories, of interest to NASA.

TECHNOLOGY TAXONOMY MAPPING

Human-Computer Interfaces Human-Robotic Interfaces Perception/Sensing