Hospitals and training centers employ video recording systems that monitor operating rooms and simulation rooms, capturing events as they occur for later debriefing and assessment. B-Line Medical is a leading provider of video-driven healthcare education solutions for simulated and live clinical care environments. Both types of systems rely heavily on Symetrix DSPs.
“Even in a medical simulation center, where you don’t have to adhere as rigidly to medical construction standards as you do in a real clinic, the acoustical conditions are terrible— and it’s worse in clinics,” said B-Line Medical manager of AV engineering and design, John Wormington. “You have high levels of ambient noise from medical equipment, poor microphone locations dictated by medical lighting, compact medical booms, sterile fields, and often high levels of noise from the patient or the operating theater. Nothing can be attached to the walls and everything must be able to be cleaned, so all surfaces are hard and acoustically reflective. It’s very rare to even have an acoustic ceiling.”
That’s where Symetrix DSPs come in. “Symetrix Prism and Radius DSPs support the kind of fully flexible DSP architecture we need to achieve a quality audio signal. Medical systems have to be totally reliable, as well, and we have had long-term continuous success in using Symetrix DSP products,” Wormington says.
B-Line’s LiveCapture system records live clinical events and offers secure streaming, monitoring, debriefing, and integrated checklists. “LiveCapture is very modular,” Wormington said. “These are very simple systems, meant to go in a single room. Nothing leaves the room on any cable other than data lines. The Symetrix Prism 4×4 provides the DSP for the entire room: It controls the audio encoder and video encoder, and it enables us to link multiple rooms and multiple control spaces over Dante.” The Prism 4×4 offers PoE (Power over Ethernet), which is important because “we have to make sure our systems aren’t on the same power circuits as medical treatment devices,” Wormington said, “with PoE, that’s not an issue because we can deliver power from a network switch to the DSP.”
The Prism’s support for Dante enables all communications in and out of the treatment room to be connected over IP, eliminating the need to shut down hallways and limit infection control involvement.
