Patent ID: 7881939

Claim:
A system comprising: at least one sensor of a physiological condition of an individual; a plurality of audio input transducers distributed throughout a residence of the individual; at least one discrete, stationary background sound source within the residence with a first transducer of the plurality of transducers located at an output of the at least one discrete, stationary background sound source; control circuitry coupled to the sensor and the transducers, the control circuitry has a communications port, the control circuitry responds to speech received from the transducers and carries out a speech recognition process thereon, and in accordance with the results thereof, initiates communications with a displaced location via the communications port; and software executed by the control circuitry, the software compensates each of the plurality of input transducers to cancel background sounds from the at least one discrete, stationary background sound source and to null an acoustic signal from each of the plurality of input transducers based upon differences in phase and amplitude of the background sounds detected among each of the plurality of input transducers, the software executed by the control circuitry carrying out speech recognition of audio provided by the individual from the nulled acoustic signal provided by at least some of the plurality of input transducers, said nulling including detecting an acoustic signal from the at least one discrete, stationary background sound source through the first transducer and from each of at least two second transducers of the plurality of transducers, determining a phase difference between the acoustic signal detected by the first transducer and each of the at least two second transducers, adjusting a phase of the signal detected by the first transducer for each of the at least two second transducers based upon the phase difference of each of the respective second transducers, inverting each of the phase adjusted signals, adjusting an amplitude of the respective inverted signals and adding the respective phase and amplitude adjusted signals to the respective acoustic signal detected by the at least two second transducers to null the at least one discrete, stationary background sound source within the respective acoustic signals from the at least two second transducers.