Project Director

Ofoli, Abdul

Department Examiner

Loveless, Daniel; Reising, Donald; Clark, Amanda

Department

Dept. of Electrical Engineering

Publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Place of Publication

Chattanooga (Tenn.)

Abstract

Abstract – One problem that nurses and doctors face when treating a very weak patient is difficulty of communication. Sometimes patients become so weak that they are barely able to speak above a whisper without completely exerting themselves. Often nurses will have to put their ear directly in front of a patient’s mouth in order to hear what the patient is saying over the ambient noise in a hospital room. This becomes an even bigger problem when several patients are together in a single room and the ambient noise levels rise. One way to solve this problem would be to develop a wireless audio system to amplify the patient’s voice so that the doctors and nurses are able to hear and understand a patient who is speaking just above a whisper. There currently exists no off-the-shelf solution tailored to this specific problem. Most wireless audio systems are designed for public speaking, karaoke, or telephony, and do not work well for the problem described above. There is no self-contained of-the-shelf solution that would solve the problem well enough to be implemented on a large scale. This paper examines the problem of wireless audio amplification in a hospital room setting and proposes a practical solution in the form of a self-contained wireless voice amplification system.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge Ms. Marlena Russel for bringing the idea of a wireless voice amplification system to Dr. Ofoli and for providing funding for the parts that were used to develop the prototype. Thanks to Dr. Loveless, Dr. Reising, and Dr. Clark for sitting on the review committee and providing feedback on the project. Many thanks to Dr. Ofoli for providing direction for the project and helping me along the way.

Degree

B. S.; An honors thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Bachelor of Science.

Date

5-2016

Subject

Telecommunication in medicine; Medical informatics

Keyword

Wireless audio; voice amplification; Amplifier; Wireless; Hospital; Audio

Discipline

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Document Type

Theses

Extent

41 leaves

DCMI Type

Text

Language

English

Rights

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

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