The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is in line with the trend in medicine towards a prevention paradigm, following the premise that preventing problems is generally less costly than treating the problem or managing a future deficit. Excessive noise in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) has been clearly linked to cognitive deficits among the patients of these care areas. However, isolating the infants from any voice contact is also detrimental to language skill development. This project will investigate and develop a system that will provide for a more stable stay in the NICU, mitigate neurologic complications leading to developmental delays, and lessen the occurrence of hearing loss. The American Academy of Pediatrics? guidelines state that neonatal patients should not be exposed to noises greater than 45dBA yet hospitals struggle to achieve this. Deploying such a noise attenuation system with voice pass through capabilities will help hospitals provide the proper environment for their neonatal populations. Hospital administrators and clinical directors have expressed enthusiasm for this solution.
This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 project seeks to develop an active noise reduction system for use in an NICU incubator, while allowing a parent's voice to pass through essentially unattenuated. To achieve the noise attenuation, the unwanted noise is monitored outside and inside the incubator and a corresponding signal exactly out of phase with the detected noise is used to largely cancel the unwanted noise. The system will employ a multi-channel hybrid system employing both feedback and feedforward elements. While a more complex approach, this has been shown to have performance advantages over simpler solutions. In this phase, the size of the zone of attenuation will be expanded, the algorithm will be adapted to multiple incubators having differing shapes, and a set of fail-safe provisions will be implemented.
