Wireless-communication integrated hybrid active noise control system for infant incubators: Improve health outcomes and bonding

Abstract

This research proposes to develop a wireless communication integrated hybrid active noise control (ANC) system for infant incubators. The integrated ANC system will reduce the level of noise in the infant's ear and provide two-way wireless communication between infant and his/her parents/caregivers both inside and outside the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). The proposed system will use the ANC technique to reduce the harmful noise. The wireless communication system will be used to reduce stress and improve bonding and language development. The real-time experiments show that the proposed system can significantly reduce the noise exposure to the infants who are placed in infant incubators. Consequently, a reduction in the health risk produced by high-level noise in NICU and improved bonding opportunities for infants and their parents will be seen.

Challenges posed by infant incubators and their potential mitigation

“…The high levels of noises in the NICU have been shown to cause many negative health problems including sleep disturbance and other forms of stress, as well as changes in physiological responses such as heart and respiratory rate, blood pressure and oxygen saturation 13 . These health risks can be avoided by using wireless-communication integrated hybrid active noise control system (HANCS) in infant incubators to improve the health outcomes and to improve bonding opportunities for infants and parents 14 .…”

A Wireless Reference Active Noise Control Headphone Using Coherence Based Selection Technique

“…Therefore, the targeted noise reduction is compromised due to the poorer noise-to-interference ratio at the reference microphone. The wireless ANC techniques have been developed in previous works [17][18][19] to solve this issue. The main approach is to use the wireless sensor to pick up the clean reference signal and transmits it to the ANC controller at the users' location.…”

“…Among these applications, the ANC is applied in the infant incubator to attenuate the environmental noise. The wireless communication system integrated with the ANC system is implemented at the infant and parent side and used to provide the bidirectional communication channel [17,18]. The reference signal can also be acquired and transmitted through the wireless way [19].…”