I'm sure many of you have experienced the dental drill before - typically it's used to carve out the decayed tooth material before your dentist puts in the filling. Because the sound of the drill usually comes immediately before some amount of acute pain (dentists like to call this pain pressure), many people unfortunately associate the drilling sound with anxiety, a sense of fear (seriously!), and a mouth that was numbed an hour too late.
In reality though, the sound of the drill should be linked to happiness! Your cavities will disappear, and the value of your mouth will increase tremendously with the new addition of expensive (and shiny) metals.
Anyways, a group of researchers at King's College London Dental Institute led by professor Brian Millar have developed something called the digital signal processor chip.
How it works is simple: you attach this small device to your headphones, and - similar to those Bose Noise Canceling headphones - the sound of all that dreaded drilling inside your mouth suddenly disappears!
The trick here is that this device selectively filters incoming sounds. So although your ears will miss out on all that deep drilling, you can still hear the dentist warning that you will continue to feel that "pressure."
Details: this "digital signal processor" chilp analyzes the incoming sound from the dental drill via small microphones placed near the drill and then produces an antiphase sound wave that cancels out the undesirable noise. Further, "adaptive filtering" technology is used so that the sound of the drill, and only the drill, is removed even if the drill's sound wave amplitude and frequency change during your time on the chair.
Yet somehow, you still hear your dentist: "You might feel some pressure ..."
Photo creds to Sony.
Imagine you are the woman in the pink. Imagine the the chair is in a slightly (er .. considerably) more reclined position. And now imagine the sounds of THIS ... eliminated!
Pure bliss!
Now how do we bring this to market?
Eric
No comments:
Post a Comment