Work place: Automation Research Laboratory (LARA), LR11ES18, National Engineering School of Tunis, University of Tunis El Manar, 1002 Tunis, Tunisia
E-mail: faten.benabdallah@enit.utm.tn
Website:
Research Interests:
Biography
Dr. Faten Ben Abdallah is currently an Assistant Professor at the National Engineering School of Tunis (ENIT), University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia. she received the Engineering degree in electrical engineering and the M.Sc. degree in communication systems from ENIT. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Signal Processing and Telecommunications from the University of Rennes I, France in 2009. She has more than 20 years of teaching experience in engineering schools at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
She is a researcher at the Automation Research Laboratory (LA.R.A), where she contributes to research on embedded and edge intelligence for healthcare engineering and assistive robotics, intelligent transportation systems and connected mobility, autonomous multi-platform robotic systems, and reconfigurable software-defined radio architectures. She has co-supervised Ph.D. and supervised Master’s students and has served as a reviewer for several international journals and IEEE conferences. Her research outputs include peer-reviewed journal articles, Scopus-indexed publications, and book chapters, reflecting sustained contributions at the intersection of embedded intelligence, real-time systems, and autonomous robotics.
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.
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