Many Students with autism have significant sensory integration issues. (The inability create coherant information from the deluge of visual, audio and tactile data that constantly enters the brain)
Many teachers have found that students can concentrate better in class if they wear noise-canceling headphones with their favorite sounds playing. However, this also prevents the teacher from inerrupting their work with instructions to the class.
The desired solution is a hardware/software hack that would replicate the entertainment system found on many airlines today: each passenger can listen/watch to their prefered program, yet when the flight attendant needs to talk to the passengers, his/her input overrides the programming and all passengers hear the annoucement.
One possible solution is a modified MP3 player, that monitors an FW frequency while playing the MP3. The teacher would have a low-powered FM transmitter that he/she would use to broadcast to all the students. Other solutions would be viable also.
The solution needs to be accesible to a non-technical community, meaning, easily set up and used without a lot of individual configuration (no more than adding a playlist of songs to an MP3 player and choosing an unused frequency on the transmitter.
Several companies make low-powered FM transmitter kits and MP3 player kids that could be used for this project with some modification
The project design would be provided to high school electronics programs as a class project, and then deployed to autism classrooms in the school district. A project to implement the solution in the greater Washingtion DC area is in the conceptual stage
Comments
Hi, you have a good idea.
Hi, you have a good idea. Lets see if i can help.
What you need to get is a simple 2 channel mixer per student. You can probably find this kind of stuff very cheap at a radio shack. Also you would need a microphone ( best a wireless lapel mic ) for the teacher. You would then have to feed the teacher mic into a channel of each student and the mp3 from the student into the other channel. In this way if the teacher had something to say it would get mixed with the audio track. It could be made with a master volume for the student so he could change volume but never cut the teacher channel.
( please note that when i say 2 channel mixer i'm not refering to dj mixers that are expensive but DIY kind of mixers )
Let me know if you found this info relevant.
Cheers,
A. Teixeira
I have a couple of ideas but
I have a couple of ideas but I may ask you to revise the constraints a little bit.
I think that you would have some sort of device that is able to switch from one audio input to another regardless of what the two inputs are. You would have two channels: MAIN and INTERRUPT. This way you can hook up the device that the student is using to the "MAIN" channel, and you would hook up a normal FM radio to the "INTERRUPT" channel. The teacher could then use any off the shelf FM transmitter along with a microphone or headset that is set to the same frequency that the FM radios are tuned in.
The switching can be handled by a Dual Channel audio switch. You can use simpler means, however I would recommend something designed to swich audio signals so that you can eliminate the "popping" noise that can come from switching audio signals. Volume control may also be an issue since you may not be able to quickly louden the teacher's voice if the student is listening to something fairly quietly.
Now the tricky part would be that some kind of control would be needed to switch your audio signals from MAIN into INTERRUPT mode. This would have to happen with some kind of wireless (RF) receiver and a microprocessor/logic circuit that decodes the data and sends the appropriate signal to the audio switch. This circuit will also need power. There are some fairly good rechargable batteries on the market but using this every day all day may be an issue.
So here are my questions:
How much usage would these devices see? How many hours per day? How many days per week?
How big is the classroom and the needed range of control?
Could there be multiple classrooms next to each other that would need to run on separate frequencies?
Feel free to send me a PM as well :)
~Joel
Hi, this is my first post so
Hi, this is my first post so i'll try to make it quick.
I think is an awsome idea Jerry. What about if :
1. each person or child carries an mobile phone, so the teacher can transmit to each one of them while they
listen to their favorite music nor podcast. Now what i find intresting is that we can create a small neural net to learn from each child or person so it learns about their preferences and dislikes accoring to the hour of the day, for example listen the same song on an specific hour because they feel calmed.
2. each person can have their own easy to to reach by music, maybe know the state of mind they are in because of the music they are hearing.
3. the hack for the sound waves are very easy to reach but the goal is to make it slow and easy because if not the interruption can be a bit scary for them similar of what software like tracktor does with the effects, so when teacher says something well the music is mixed and not interrupted so the communication is nice and armonic hehe.
If is anything i can do to help please feel free to contact me i can put a couple of hours of coding to help :).
Regards From South America.
H.
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