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Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is commonly used to obtain year‐round continuous data on marine soundscapes harboring valuable information on species distributions or ecosystem dynamics. This continuously increasing amount of data requires highly efficient automated analysis techniques in order to exploit the full potential of the available data. Here, we propose a benchmark, which consists of a public dataset, a well‐defined task and evaluation procedure to develop and test automated analysis techniques. This benchmark focuses on the special case of detecting animal vocalizations in a real‐world dataset from the marine realm. We believe that such a benchmark is necessary to monitor the progress in the development of new detection algorithms in the field of marine bioacoustics. We ultimately use the proposed benchmark to test three detection approaches, namely ANIMAL‐SPOT, Koogu and a simple custom sequential convolutional neural network (CNN), and report performances. We report the performance of the three detection approaches in a blocked cross‐validation fashion with 11 site‐year blocks for a multi‐species detection scenario in a large marine passive acoustic dataset. Performance was measured with three simple metrics (i.e., true classification rate, noise misclassification rate and call misclassification rate) and one combined fitness metric, which allocates more weight to the minimization of false positives created by noise. Overall, ANIMAL‐SPOT performed the best with an average F metric of 0.83, followed by the custom CNN with an average fitness metric of 0.79 and finally Koogu with an average fitness metric of 0.59. The presented benchmark is an important step to advance in the automatic processing of the continuously growing amount of PAM data that are collected throughout the world's oceans. To ultimately achieve usability of developed algorithms, the focus of future work should be laid on the reduction of the false positives created by noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives: Sound is an important environmental factor that influences the expression of behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia. Recent research on the effect of soundscape has shown promising results in improving environmental impact on people with dementia. However, no controlled studies have aimed to quantify the effects of soundscape intervention on resident outcomes. The aim of this study was to assess the feasibility and impact of a soundscape intervention on people with dementia and behavioral symptoms. Research Design and Methods: Pilot single-blind repeated-measures randomized controlled trial of an augmented soundscape intervention. Participants were people with dementia in a hospital-based specialized dementia unit. Participants were randomized to an augmented soundscape intervention delivered in their room in the morning and evening or treatment as usual, with 2 baseline weeks and 4 weekly post-randomization assessments of the primary and secondary behavioral outcomes. Results: The soundscape intervention was feasible in terms of recruitment, retention, and delivery of the intervention. There were improvements in the neuropsychiatric inventory total scores over time in both groups (−5.89, 95%CI −8.45 to −3.28, p < .001), but no differences between groups. There were no significant group, time, or group × time differences for the Pittsburgh Agitation Scale (PAS) total score. For the PAS-resisting care subscale, there was a significant group × time difference, with a greater reduction in the soundscape group over the study period (−0.81, 95% CI −1.59 to −0.03, p = .042). Discussion and Implications: In this pilot study, soundscape augmentation was a feasible and effective nonpharmacological approach to reducing resistance to care in people with dementia, although it did not improve neuropsychiatric symptoms more globally. Further studies with larger samples and of longer duration are needed to investigate the long-term effects of augmented sonic environments on people with dementia. Clinical Trials Registration Number: NCT04809545 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We navigate through the environment using our sensory stimuli. Sound is significant in guiding us through space and making us aware of time. Soundscape is an acoustic environment as perceived and experienced by a person. While an unfamiliar and chaotic soundscape can increase anxiety and stress, a well-designed soundscape can make the experience pleasant and improve moods. People with dementia suffer from a neurodegenerative disorder, leading to a progressive decline in cognitive health. Behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) refer to a group of noncognitive behaviours that affect the prediction and control of dementia. Reducing the occurrence of BPSD is one of the main goals of dementia care. People with severe dementia usually live in nursing homes, long-term care facilities or memory care units where sensory perception is unfamiliar. The strange sensory stimuli add to the anxiety and distress of residents as care facilities are often not customized based on individual needs. Research shows that incorporating pleasant sounds into the environment, known as an 'augmented soundscape,' positively impacts behaviour and reduces BPSD. Most design tools and guidelines include eliminating unwanted noise. To date, there are no guidelines for sound augmentation in dementia care design. The previous study of sound selection showed promising results in sound augmentation and identifying sounds that a person with dementia may prefer during a specific time of the day. The sharpness and high-pitch sounds, such as animal localization, had positive results. Cricket sounds showed positive feedback during nighttime and evening; either its tranquillity made it favourable, or the continuous sound masked other noises during the night (like white noise). These results can be used to introduce sound augmentation guidelines. The goal is to introduce sound as a positive design implementation to enhance mood, reduce apathy and depression, lower anxiety and stress, and promote health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studying marine soundscapes by detecting known sound events and quantifying their spatio-temporal patterns can provide ecologically relevant information. However, the exploration of underwater sound data to find and identify possible sound events of interest can be highly time-intensive for human analysts. To speed up this process, we propose a novel methodology that first detects all the potentially relevant acoustic events and then clusters them in an unsupervised way prior to manual revision. We demonstrate its applicability on a short deployment. To detect acoustic events, a deep learning object detection algorithm from computer vision (YOLOv8) is re-trained to detect any (short) acoustic event. This is done by converting the audio to spectrograms using sliding windows longer than the expected sound events of interest. The model detects any event present on that window and provides their time and frequency limits. With this approach, multiple events happening simultaneously can be detected. To further explore the possibilities to limit the human input needed to create the annotations to train the model, we propose an active learning approach to select the most informative audio files in an iterative manner for subsequent manual annotation. The obtained detection models are trained and tested on a dataset from the Belgian Part of the North Sea, and then further evaluated for robustness on a freshwater dataset from major European rivers. The proposed active learning approach outperforms the random selection of files, both in the marine and the freshwater datasets. Once the events are detected, they are converted to an embedded feature space using the BioLingual model, which is trained to classify different (biological) sounds. The obtained representations are then clustered in an unsupervised way, obtaining different sound classes. These classes are then manually revised. This method can be applied to unseen data as a tool to help bioacousticians identify recurrent sounds and save time when studying their spatio-temporal patterns. This reduces the time researchers need to go through long acoustic recordings and allows to conduct a more targeted analysis. It also provides a framework to monitor soundscapes regardless of whether the sound sources are known or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the broader context of improving interactions between artificial intelligence and humans, the question has arisen regarding whether auditory and rhythmic support could increase attention for visual stimuli that do not stand out clearly from an information stream. To this end, we designed an experiment inspired by pip-and-pop but more appropriate for eliciting attention and P3a-event-related potentials (ERPs). In this study, the aim was to distinguish between targets and distractors based on the subject's electroencephalography (EEG) data. We achieved this objective by employing different machine learning (ML) methods for both individual-subject (IS) and cross-subject (CS) models. Finally, we investigated which EEG channels and time points were used by the model to make its predictions using saliency maps. We were able to successfully perform the aforementioned classification task for both the IS and CS scenarios, reaching classification accuracies up to 76%. In accordance with the literature, the model primarily used the parietal–occipital electrodes between 200 ms and 300 ms after the stimulus to make its prediction. The findings from this research contribute to the development of more effective P300-based brain–computer interfaces. Furthermore, they validate the EEG data collected in our experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spiking neural networks (SNNs), which are composed of biologically plausible spiking neurons, and combined with bio-physically realistic auditory periphery models, offer a means to explore and understand human auditory processing-especially in tasks where precise timing is essential. However, because of the inherent temporal complexity in spike sequences, the performance of SNNs has remained less competitive compared to artificial neural networks (ANNs). To tackle this challenge, a fundamental research topic is the configuration of spike-timing and the exploration of more intricate architectures. In this work, we demonstrate a learnable axonal delay combined with local skip-connections yields state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks for spoken word recognition. Additionally, we introduce an auxiliary loss term to further enhance accuracy and stability. Experiments on the neuromorphic speech benchmark datasets, NTIDIDIGITS and SHD, show improvements in performance when incorporating our delay module in comparison to vanilla feed forward SNNs. Specifically, with the integration of our delay module, the performance on NTIDIDIGITS and SHD improves by 14% and 18%, respectively. When paired with local skip-connections and the auxiliary loss, our approach surpasses both recurrent and convolutional neural networks, yet uses 10x fewer parameters for NTIDIDIGITS and 7x fewer for SHD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Traditional healthcare is centred around providing in-hospital services using hospital owned medical instruments. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that this approach lacks flexibility to insure follow-up and treatment of common medical problems. In an alternative setting adapted to this problem, participatory healthcare can be considered centred around data provided by patients owning and operating medical data collection equipment in their homes. OBJECTIVE: In order to trigger such a shift reliable and price attractive devices need to become available. Snoring, as a human sound production during sleep, can reflect sleeping behaviour and indicate sleep problems as an element of the overall health condition of a person. METHODS: The use of off-the-shelf hardware from Internet of Things platforms and standard audio components allows the development of such devices. A prototype of a snoring sound detector with this purpose is developed. RESULTS: The device, controlled by the patient and with specific snoring recording and analysing functions is demonstrated as a model for future participatory healthcare. CONCLUSIONS: Design of monitoring devices following this model could allow market introduction of new equipment for participatory healthcare, bringing a care complementary to traditional healthcare to the reach of patients, and could result in benefits from enhanced patient participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]