Customer: GfK Italia

Category:  Television Audience measurment

Summary description: portable personal tool for passive recording of radio and television

Type of activity: electronic design, identification of mathematical algorithms, parallel processing and distributed software development, mass production, data acquisition software development

Customer brief

Create a portable instrument, easy to wear by the interviewee, that can detect the radio and television transmissions even when the user is out of the house. The new device aims to dramatically change the detection methods used so far for TV audience measurment, thus making the same survey completely passive, more reliable and precise.

Product description

Miniaturized werable hardware able to capture and process real-time audio data to generate a sound fingerprint that can uniquely identify the audio fragments. The sound fingerprints are then transmitted via GPRS technology to a cloud system that can store the data for subsequent processing. A parallel and distributed computing system compares the sound prints of the mobile devices with those of each channel, in order to identify the ones that matches. The sound matching algorithm, capable of performing the functions described above, has been developed and optimized in our laboratories and has been certified by numerous international entities as the most efficient system on the market.

Specification and technological peculiarities

Development of complex mathematical algorithms, optimization software for parallel and distributed calculations, development of acquisition clusters and high-reliability data analysis.