Sound powered phone alternative options?

[stoney85]

Hi, a recent career path change has put me to work with Hyperbaric Chambers, I'll be assisting in design changes, maintenance side of things, and so on.

The chambers we use are 100% oxygen monoplace chambers, and one thing I'm looking at is communication to the patient, one mandatory requirement as stipulated by FDA (US) and TGA (Australia) is that there can be no powered devices inside the chamber, pressurized air chambers with oxygen masks are allowed basic low wattage speakers.

So the solution has been to use sound powered phones, exactly the same thing submarines use when they go silent
http://www.amronintl.com/model-h203-01-sound-powered-phone-with-male-audio-plug.html

Below is the receiver and communicator that sits on the outside, now this design is different in the fact that it transmits vibrations to a magnet speaker that is directly screwed to the chamber hull itself, (which is a 5/8" thick stainless steel vessel) and turns the hull into the speaker
http://www.amronintl.com/amron-international-single-lock-chamber-communicator.html

The chambers don't really need the communications, as you can just raise your voice slightly more and can still be heard fine through the hull, plus the view ports also allow visual communication, but its a nice ability to have

What I'm interested to find out is what other possible options are available or could be used, we need something that can be tapped into an external microphone/speaker setup, be used for a DVD player that sits on a hull window and so on.


Something like this for example, the boombox V3 http://wowzer.com.au/boombox-v3 is a vibration speaker, so I am assuming works on the same principal as the communicator.

I'm only seeing what else is available as what is currently on there is over 20 years old in design, I guess though there isn't much technological advancement with sound powered devices though.

Look forward to hearing from the much more knowledgeable people than myself

 

[jedishrfu]

I had a friend attend some hyperbaric treatments and his complaint was the choice of music and the fact that he couldn't control the volume... So you want to factor that into your design personalized music...

 

[stoney85]

Customer comfort is a priority, what usually happens is a TV screen is placed over one of the port windows for the customer to watch whatever they chose, that or they sleep or read for the 90 mins.

Control from inside the chamber would present some problems, purely for the safety reasons stipulated by FDA regarding an Oxygen pressure vessel, no flamables, no electrics, etc

 

[jedishrfu]

In my friends case, I got the feeling that there was another couple of patients in the chamber and so he had less control.

Perhaps you could design a stethoscope-like device with earmuffs that can pickup localized vibrations.

 

[stoney85]

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Mandolin-Sensor-transducer-Pickup-internal-Mount-w-1-4-Single-Audio-Endpin-Jack-/350622875317?pt=AU_Musical_Instruments_Instruments&hash=item51a2c07eb5

Would something like this work?

Might buy one and try it out, theyre designed more for guitars and musical instruments, but maybe a few of these linked into an amplifier output might work, the only issue is i can think of is that there would be next to no vibrations from a human voice in a thousand kilo 15mm thick stainless steel walled chamber