Biography

Vicky Young completed a Masters of Health Science in Clinical Engineering in the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) at the University of Toronto. Her Masters work was in the field of sensory communication and clinical engineering and focused on pre-clinical trials of a novel real-time distortion product otoacoustic emission device. Vicky holds undergraduate degrees in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo and Biology from Dalhousie University. Vicky’s experience is in the field of health technology management, research development & design and planning & coordination.

Vicky began her doctoral studies in 2007 with the Department of Rehabilitation Science in collaboration with IBBME. She is also a CIHR Fellow in Health Care, Technology and Place. Her research focuses on improving the user interface of current push-button personal emergency response systems (PERS) for older adults. Specifically, further developing a prototype PERS communication and response module (CRM) to enhance system intelligence, as well as improve and verify the speech recognition for distressed older adult voices in various emergency situations. An older adult speech corpus will be developed for this project and usability testing will be conducted using the enhanced PERS CRM with older adult actors. Performance results will be analyzed and older adult feedback will be obtained using an inclusive design approach. This project is part of a larger project, the HELPER System (Health, Evaluation, and Logging for Personal Emergency Response), which also incorporates fall detection and daily activity monitoring using computer vision techniques.

Curriculum Vitae - Vicky Young

Selected Publications

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

Hamil, M., Young, V., Boger, J. and Mihailidis, A. (2009). Development of an automated speech recognition interface for personal emergency response systems. Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, 6(26).

Young, V. and Mihailidis, A. (in press, 2009). Difficulties in Automatic Speech Recognition of dysarthric speakers and the implications for speech-based applications used by the elderly: A literature review. Assistive Technology Journal.

Peer Reviewed Conference Proceedings

Young, V., Harrison, R., Dolan, A. and Kunov, H. (2000) Comparison of three distortion product otoacoustic emission devices, Journal of the Canadian Acoustical Association, Acoustic Week Canada Proceedings 2000, 28, 3: p136-137.

Poster Presentations

Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering Scientific Day, University of Toronto, May 14, 2009. An automated, speech-based personal emergency response system for the older adult.

Masters Thesis

Young, V. (2000) Pre-Clinical Testing of Real-Time Distortion Product Otoacoustic Emission Devices. University of Toronto. 1-101. Masters Thesis.