The broader impact/commercial potential of this project will be to reduce the risk of health impairments and disabilities for infants caused by high noise levels. The proposed WCIANR system can dramatically reduce the educational and public health cost by reducing hearing impairment, cognitive disorders, learning disabilities, and acute vital sign variability of NICU infants. For example, the lifetime educational cost and the lifetime cost of hearing loss have been estimated at $115,600 to $175,000 per child. The average total cost is around $2.1 billion per year. In addition, parental bonding is critical in a child's life because this first relationship determines the biological and emotional ?template? for all future relationships. The proposed WCIANR system can provide these vital bonding opportunities for NICU infants and their parents and improve infants? language development. Communicating with NICU babies can also benefit the new mothers in preventing postpartum depression and improving bonding. In addition to infant incubators, the proposed ANR system is applicable to any commercial industry where hearing protection is necessity to prevent people from hearing injury and loss, such as automotive industry, mechanical fabricating industry, medical equipment industry, mine industry and aviation industry.
This Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase I project seeks to demonstrate the feasibility of a wireless communication integrated active noise reduction (WCIANR) system for the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) environment, combining an improved active noise reduction (ANR) capability with a wireless unattenuated voice pass through function to permit communication with an infant. Traditional ANR systems cannot be applied directly to incubators without modification due to complicated noise models in the NICU. The NICU environment has multiple unexpected noise sources both inside and outside the incubators. The proposed system would combine feed-forward and feedback ANR systems to generate a larger zone of silence, offer deeper noise attenuation, and operate in complex noise environments. The proposed ANR system should reduce the level of the noise at the infant?s head by 20-25dB. In addition to reducing the unwanted noise reaching the infant, the WCIANR system will facilitate the two-way wireless communication between the infant and his or her parents and caregivers.
