Design of Flexible Meander Line Antenna for Healthcare for Wireless Medical Body Area Networks

A flexible meander line monopole antenna (MMA) is presented in this paper. The antenna can be worn for on-and off-body applications. The overall dimension of the MMA is 37 mm x 50 mm x2.37 mm3. The MMA was manufactured and measured, and the results matched with simulation results. The MMA design shows a bandwidth of up to 1282.4 (450.5) MHz and provides gains of 3.03 (4.85) dBi in the lower and upper operating bands, respectively, showing omnidirectional radiation patterns in free space. While worn on the chest or arm, bandwidths as high as 688.9 (500.9) MHz and 1261.7 (524.2) MHz, and the gains of 3.80 (4.67) dBi and 3.00 (4.55) dBi were observed. The experimental measurements of the read range confirmed the results of the coverage range of up to 11 meters.

AV Speech Enhancement Challenge using a Real Noisy Corpus

This paper presents, a first of its kind, audio-visual (AV) speech enhacement challenge in real-noisy settings. A detailed description of the AV challenge, a novel real noisy AV corpus (ASPIRE), benchmark speech enhancement task, and baseline performance results are outlined. The latter are based on training a deep neural architecture on a synthetic mixture of Grid corpus and ChiME3 noises (consisting of bus, pedestrian, cafe, and street noises) and testing on the ASPIRE corpus. Subjective evaluations of five different speech enhancement algorithms (including SEAGN, spectrum subtraction (SS) , log-minimum mean-square error (LMMSE), audio-only CochleaNet, and AV CochleaNet) are presented as baseline results. The aim of the multi-modal challenge is to provide a timely opportunity for comprehensive evaluation of novel AV speech enhancement algorithms, using our new benchmark, real-noisy AV corpus and specified performance metrics. This will promote AV speech processing research globally, stimulate new ground-breaking multi-modal approaches, and attract interest from companies, academics and researchers working in AV speech technologies and applications. We encourage participants (through a challenge website sign-up) from both the speech and hearing research communities, to benefit from their complementary approaches to AV speech in noise processing.