Blog Post #2: FM System Taking Education to a New Level

An FM Radio station, to us, is our chance to catch up with the “hottest hits,” or breaking news. But for some people, Frequency Modulation (FM) has the power to change their lives. According to class lecture, in 1933, Edwin Armstrong got a patent for inventing the FM Radio. His technique was to modulate the frequency instead of modulating the amplitude. What’s the difference? Well, by modulating the frequency instead of the amplitude, FM was able to produce a clearer sound without any static in the background. At the University of North Texas in Denton, TX, an investigation was conducted to see the potential benefits of an FM system for children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), ADHD, or both disorders.

The study was conducted with 11 children from the ages of birth-12 years old, both males and females. The children with these disorders all tend to display abnormal responses to sensory input. In the study it states, “Processing of auditory information is absolutely essential to functioning and learning in the classroom yet, children with ASD and ADHD exhibit abnormal behavioral performance on auditory based tasks, especially in the presence of background noise.”[1] Another thing that they take into account is that Preschool, elementary and secondary classrooms typically have poor acoustics, and that this would likely create a listening and learning challenge for these students.

Their approach to all of this, and their way to possibly fix it, was the use of a personal frequency modulation (FM) system. This consists of a small receiver (Phonak iSense Micro FM Recievers) that would be worn in the child’s ear, paired with a transmitter and microphone worn by the teacher. The job of this was the FM system improving the “signal-to-noise” ratio at the child’s ear by transmitting the teacher’s voice directly into the child’s ear at a comfortable volume. At the end of the study and many classroom tests with the children, it was shown that the FM system significantly improved speech recognition of noise in the children diagnosed with ASD and/or ADHD. It is amazing to see how simple technology can be innovative and able to help the education of students that don’t have the same advantages that other students have. Frequency Modulation has not only impacted the community of radios, but also the community of people with ASD and/or ADHD.

                                                                          

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[1] Schafer, E. C., Mathews, L., Mehta, S., Hill, M., Munoz, A., Bishop, R., & Moloney, M. (2013). Personal FM systems for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and/or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): An initial investigation. Journal of Communication Disorders, 46(1), 30-52. doi:http://dx.doi.org.libweb.lib.utsa.edu/10.1016/j.jcomdis.2012.09.002