Noboru Nakasako, Tomofumi Nakano, Toshihiro Shinohara, Masato Nakayama, Tetsuji Uebo
24th International Congress on Sound and Vibration, ICSV 2017, Jul, 2017
Basically, it is important to know the distance and position to the elderly and the patient in order to realize improvement of home health care. The authors have already proposed a method to estimate the distance between a microphone and a target using audible sounds, which is based on the phase interference between transmitted and reflected waves. We call this method Acoustic Distance Measurement (abbr. ADM) method and have studied it from various viewpoints. This ADM method is a practical method just to apply Fourier transform to the power spectrum. However, in the distance measurement using the audible sound, there was a problem that when a person spoke in the surroundings, private conversation was recorded etc. In addition, for example, a human face or body has a relatively small reflection coefficient, and is not a flat plate but a complicated aspect, and the reflected wave is likely to be scattered in various directions. This means that we can only observe very small reflected waves or no reflected waves at all. On the other hand, there is a reproduction method of sound field by parametric array loudspeaker using ultrasonic sound. This paper describes a new trial of ADM from sound source to the human as a target using ultrasonic sound. More concretely, as a method for sound enhancement, we attempt to control a phase of the transmitted ultrasonic sound at each channel using the delay-and-sum beamforming technique. In addition, we try to detect the distance to the target, expanding the original distance estimation method by introducing synchronous addition to the power spectra. Finally, the validity of our method is also confirmed through experiment by applying our method to an actual sound field.