Work place: Automation Research Laboratory (LARA), LR11ES18, National Engineering School of Tunis, University of Tunis El Manar, 1002 Tunis, Tunisia
E-mail: sarah.benhlima@enit.utm.tn
Website:
Research Interests:
Biography
Ms. Sarra Ben Halima received the M.Sc. degree in automatic control and industrial computing from the Higher Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology of Kairouan, Tunisia, in 2023. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the National Engineering School of Tunis (ENIT), University of Tunis El Manar, and conducts her research at the Automation Research Laboratory (LARA) on modeling, control, and trajectory planning for autonomous and communicative mobile robots dedicated to elderly home assistance.
Since September 2025, she has been an Adjunct Lecturer at the Higher Institute of Computer Science (ISI), University of Tunis El Manar, Tunis, Tunisia. Her research interests include assistive mobile robotics for elderly home care, embedded and edge AI for real-time perception, human–robot interaction through speech and multimodal interfaces, safety monitoring in domestic environments, and learning-based navigation and motion planning under uncertainty.
By Sarra Ben Halima Faten Ben Abdallah Joseph Haggege
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijitcs.2026.04.04, Pub. Date: 8 Aug. 2026
This paper presents a fully integrated, real-time assistive system that combines voice-based object recognition with a generative conversational interface, specifically designed to enhance elderly care through edge AI deployment. The proposed framework enables intuitive human–robot interaction in domestic environments by fusing natural language understanding, optimized visual detection, and local generative response. Voice commands are processed through a speech-to-text pipeline using the Google Web Speech API, with keyword extraction triggering object detection via a quantized YOLOv8n model accelerated through TensorRT with FP16 inference on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano. In parallel, a locally deployed generative AI assistant, executed entirely on-device, provides empathetic dialogue to support social engagement and emotional well-being. The proposed system adopts a hybrid edge architecture in which object detection, robot control, and LLM-based dialogue generation are executed on-device, while speech-to-text transcription relies on a cloud-based service. This generative interface is implemented as an LLM-based Emotional Assistant. The system achieves 13 FPS with an inference latency of 70 ms for object detection, 94.3% speech recognition accuracy, and an F1-score of 0.69 at a 0.5 confidence threshold. All AI components are executed on-board, preserving privacy for on- device processing while maintaining real-time responsiveness. Experimental validation confirms the effectiveness of deploying multimodal AI, including generative models, on resource-constrained hardware. This work lays the foundation for autonomous, voice-guided care robots that not only assist in locating objects but also engage users socially, promoting greater autonomy and quality of life for older adults.
[...] Read more.Subscribe to receive issue release notifications and newsletters from MECS Press journals