Education Install: AV Enhances Learning Experience

Speech pathology center adds network control to facilitate interaction between students and teachers.

By Roger Maycock

Pro AV Magazine

8/1/05

Challenge: Design an AV system that enables instructors to monitor student progress in multiple concurrent speech therapy sessions without physically entering the rooms.

Solution: Install an AV system that can support 14 simultaneous users, allowing teachers to remotely monitor individual student activities.

To help facilitate interaction between speech pathology teachers and students, Lehman College in Bronx, NY, needed a sophisticated AV system that would allow instructors to observe concurrent speech therapy sessions without physically entering each of the rooms. The college enlisted Hauppauge, NY-based AV integrator IVCi LLC to design and install an AV system to meet its needs, and recently unveiled its new Speech and Hearing Center, which includes 16 speech therapy rooms, two master control rooms, eight observation stations, two directors’ offices, and two classrooms. Each of the rooms are networked together to enable certified speech pathologists to remotely monitor and supervise graduate students while they interact with patients.

“The ability of the certified speech pathologists to effectively monitor our students from a central location was critical in the design of this system,” says Carolyn McCarthy, director of the Speech and Hearing Center. “Previously, supervisors had to physically enter the therapy room if the student needed re-direction or assistance, and we felt this disrupted the natural flow of the sessions. We wanted the ability to communicate with the students as needed—with minimal disruption to the patients. We also wanted the system to be capable of recording the sessions so that students could later review and self-evaluate the therapy.”

The facility’s AV system design and installation was designed as a three-phase project. Completed in October 2004, the first phase included six therapy rooms, a master control room with four observation stations, a director’s office, and a classroom located on the upper level of the facility. The second phase, which is scheduled to be completed by the end of the summer, will add another 10 therapy rooms to the building’s lower level, along with network control linking both locations. The third phase of the project is slated to begin in early 2006. To date, the Speech and Hearing Center has already invested $347,000 in its AV system.

Inside the speech therapy rooms

Designed to accommodate a single patient and student teacher, the small speech therapy rooms are equipped with two cameras: a Sony SSC-DC193 fixed camera that presents a full view of the room and a Sony EVI-D100 pan-tilt-zoom camera that enables the speech pathologists monitoring the sessions to zoom in and observe facial expressions. The cameras feed a Keywest Technology BVPIP2 picture-in-picture processor that enables monitoring of both cameras on the room’s JVC TMA-13SU preview monitors.

For audio monitoring, each room is equipped with a Shure MX202WP/C low-profile plate mount microphone to pick up the voices of both the student therapist and patient. The microphones feed a Radio Design Labs STM-3 microphone preamplifier.

In each therapy room, a local rack houses the equipment to interconnect the room with the larger system. Audio and video signals pass through an Extron MDA-3AV AV distribution amplifier, and then to a Furman Sound HA-6AB headphone amplifier for use in the adjacent observation room where parents or relatives can observe the patient’s sessions from behind two-way mirrors. Relatives listen in via Sennheiser EH-1430 headphones. The Extron AV distribution amplifier also directs signals to a Sony SVO-1330 VCR housed in the main control room, as well as feeding the Extron MAV2424 AV 24x24 composite AV matrix switcher in the control room.

Using Listen Technologies’ LS-04 assistive listening wireless systems, student teachers can communicate with their instructors. The speech pathologists can discreetly re-direct the student teacher’s course of action and make recommendations without distracting the patient.

To facilitate camera actions, audio routing, and the various switching functions to interconnect each therapy room to the main control room, Crestron QM-RMC room media controllers are deployed to eliminate the associated costs and additional programming involved with addressing individual components. The QM-RMCs access the room’s equipment via serial or IR control and communicate with the main control room over the center’s IP network. The speech pathology center’s IP network only carries control protocol to the QM-RMCs installed in the local racks.

For IVCi, these local racks greatly simplified the overall installation and contributed to containing costs by minimizing control cabling requirements. “We streamlined the cabling of the system by incorporating remote racks in each therapy room to support the two cameras, the picture-in-picture generator, audio distribution amps, the assistive listening system, and the Crestron QM-RMC,” says Peter Brown, director of IVCi’s Audio Visual Integrated Services. Using the Crestron QM-RMC controller to handle all of the switching/assignment tasks of the individual components reduced costs by eliminating the need to assign individual control lines to each component.

Controlled observation

There are two main control rooms—one each on the upper and lower levels. The main control room enables users to monitor the activity in the therapy rooms, and houses VCRs used to record sessions, along with four observation stations the speech pathologists use to monitor and interact with student teachers. A Crestron PRO2 dual bus control system processor with a TPS-4500V touchpanel controller manages the room selection and AV signal routing tasks in the control room (see sidebar at left for more details).

“Ease of use was the overriding design criteria with this system,” says Tim Hennen, vice president of Audio Visual Integrated Services at IVCi. “We provided a friendly GUI with a help menu that was specifically developed for teachers and students who aren’t necessarily familiar with complex AV environments. When a room selection is made, all switching and signal routing tasks involving the remote location are handled seamlessly in the background.”

In addition to housing the Extron MAV2424 AV 24x24 matrix switcher, the main control room has a Shure MX418D/C talkback microphone and a Furman Sound HA-6AB headphone amplifier for use with Sennheiser EH-1430 headphones.

While observing therapy room activity, speech pathologists can communicate with student teachers via talkback mic, with signals routed through a Biamp AudiaFlex audio matrix switcher to the therapy room. The AudiaFlex system supports all talkback microphones in the facility.

IVCi also equipped the facility’s directors offices and two classrooms with monitoring capabilities. The directors offices, which duplicate the functions of the observation stations with greater privacy, include Sony KV27FS120 27-inch TV monitors and use Crestron’s e-Control web GUI to interface with the system.

Designed to accommodate about 25 people each, the two classrooms are equipped with Sony KV27FS120 27-inch TV monitors, which allow the speech pathologists to assemble their students for discussion and/or observation of a therapy session.

Future-ready AV

The AV system IVCi designed and implemented has already become instrumental for Lehman college. The facilities are in use 8 hours or more each day, five days a week, and support as many as 14 simultaneous users—with all equipment switching and routing assignments occurring transparently. And by incorporating plenty of capacity in the matrix switching systems, the AV system can accommodate an additional five therapy rooms and another nine classrooms and observation and monitoring stations.

“The entire system is better than what we originally envisioned, but the most important aspect is the centrality of the monitoring system,” McCarthy says. “The main control room has greatly increased our time effectiveness. Now we can remain in one place as opposed to walking up and down the hallways to observe the activity in the therapy rooms.”

Automated Control

The Bronx, NY-based Lehman College Speech and Hearing Center relies on Crestron’s PRO2 control system processor for the automation of all equipment switching and signal routing tasks associated with the selection of any given therapy room. Crestron provides a variety of tools and utilities to assist programmers with the PRO2 programming tasks, including SIMPL Windows, Crestron VisionTools Pro-e, Viewport, Test Manager, and Network Analyzer.

SIMPL Windows is Crestron’s programming environment for the Windows OS. Using SIMPL or SIMPL+, this procedural language is similar to C and BASIC. Because of the familiar syntax of SIMPL+, porting programs from other environments can save programming time and financial resources.

The company’s VisionTools Pro-e Windows-based software, which is designed to create touchscreen pages, supports 2D and 3D graphics, text, plus video and audio. Multiple control pages constitute a project, which can be loaded into a touchpanel controller or used as a group of web pages to facilitate remote access and control system tasks.

Crestron Viewport performs most of its tasks via an RS232 or TCP/IP connection between the control system and a PC. In addition to functioning as a terminal emulator for file transfer, the utility can be used to observe system processes, update new operating systems or firmware, and communicate with network control panels.

Test Manager is used for debugging a SIMPL Windows program by monitoring the status of selected signals in real time. The utility can be launched from within SIMPL Windows or function standalone.

Crestron’s Network Analyzer aids programmers in identifying Cresnet network problems that occur along the communications backbone of the company’s touchpanels, keypads, and other controllers. The utility, which can also be launched from SIMPL Windows or function standalone, looks for electrical shorts or breaks in network wiring.

Roger Maycock is the owner of MountainCrest Communications in Downey, CA. A recognized music and sound authority, Maycock has written hundreds of technical articles for a number of trade and consumer publications. He can be reached at rmaycock@mountaincrest.net.

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