Case studies

A Eurostars project with partners in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium demonstrated the feasibility of integrating automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) technology into gaming applications.  

Over the years, there has been a lot of research targeted at improving translation and interpretation software, and the D-BOX project resulted in some tangible outcomes. One of these is the development of more interactive games that react to speech. This would enable two players to enjoy playing the same games together while speaking in totally different languages. Another area for potential development is in business apps helping professionals from all over the world to work collaboratively.  

Project funded by: FFG (Austria), BMBF (Germany), SBFI (Switzerland), SPW Wallonia (Belgium)

Research organisations and companies from Finland, France, Luxembourg, Romania, Spain, Turkey and Korea worked alongside the Finnish Meteorological Institute to research and test in-vehicle information alerts for making driving safer. They developed 23 new products after running pilot tests on cars, buses and trucks in eight countries and in 11 different environments (with several of the tests conducted on icy roads). Data was collected and exchanged between vehicles through on-board sensors, and alerts from weather stations were sent to vehicles directly. This transferred information included road friction and the bursting of an airbag of a vehicle close-by (indicative of approaching an accident). Some of these pilots were showcased in Russia at the Sochi Winter Olympics in February 2014. 

As well as benefitting safety, the technical solutions also helped to cut down congestion in busy cities by gathering data from buses and taxis about traffic jams, accidents and roadworks. The consortium also intends to develop smartphone applications that colour code slippery road surfaces on your journey.  

The MoSHCA consortium used sensors and machine learning techniques to create brand new healthcare applications to support the home care of patients.

With people living longer, the world’s health systems are having to cope with a rise in disability and chronic diseases like diabetes and lung disease. There are significant benefits to society if patients can be monitored outside hospitals and doctor’s surgeries and away from the supervision of carers.

The consortium developed a raft of medical applications for home care of patients. A shoe equipped with sensors helps patients measure the pressure they are putting on injured legs and feet while undertaking rehabilitation. Moreover, a method of alerting carers and family members to people having epileptic fits when sleeping was developed, and a smartphone app helps parents monitor premature babies at home.

iVAR is an intelligent mobile platform with multimedia communication and a robot arm. It was developed by a consortium of Korean and Norwegian SMEs and universities and provides autonomous or tele-operated inspection, diagnostics, training and programming for industrial robots and automation systems.

The use of industrial robots is now moving into smaller companies. However, introducing robotics into SMEs results in bottlenecks. SMEs typically have more complicated production operations, often need to change processes and production, and may lack the necessary technical competencies and capacities.

iVAR, the Intelligent Versatile Avatar Robot, has been developed to solve these bottlenecks and enable wider use of robots in manufacturing in SMEs. It can help smaller companies cope with installing and fine-tuning their robotic systems. It can reduce cost of ownership, and the iVAR solution means issues can be solved remotely, providing instant help and saving costs.

Project funded by: Research Council Norway, KIAT (South Korea)