January 31, 2016

Ear Force One project - Biosensors

The Ear Force One project is a one week teamwork proposal based on interdisciplinary knowledges, involving biology, physics and computer skills.
“Is human ear better at detecting a sound than an electronic sound sensor?”
                                        
The global aim of Biosensors project is to compare a biological sensor with an electronic one. Therefore, through this project, we wanted to compare the capacity  of human ears and of FC-04 sound sensors to detect sounds at different distances.

To do this amazing project, we realized two different experiments. In the first one, we tested our biological sensor: the human ear. We considered that human ear is one of the most essential organ of the human body because it allows us to detect sounds and keep balance. That is the reason why we chose this spectacular organ. In the second experiment, we test our electronic sensor: the FC-04 sound sensor. This type of electronic sensor was created in order to be more accurate than ears. In others words, we thought that it would be interesting to compare these both sensors on their capacity to detect a sound coming from long distances.
Our experiment was divided into three main parts : collecting the data, interpreting them, and finally criticize them.


Collecting the data
Screenshot from 2016-01-30 00:58:58.png
We created the same experimental setup for our both systems (biological and electronic). It was first constituted by a computer spreading a sound. In front of this computer, we made marks on the floor every meters until 12 meters.

For the biological experiment, we asked to volunteers to take place at the 12 meters’ mark. We spread a sound and the participant had to tell us if he was hearing the sound or not . We were waiting for a simple answer : yes or no. After their answer, the participant had to step forward and to take place at 10 meters. We continued the same experiment until the participant reached 0 meters. We repeated this whole biological experiment with 11 persons. If you want to know more about how our sense of hearing works, you can look at this video.
Capture du 2016-01-31 17:38:44.png
A participant at 12 meters from the sound source


For the electronic experiment, the setup was exactly the same except of the participant that we replaced by the electronic sensor. The sensor was connected to a LED which was turning on each time the sensor was detecting a sound. If you want to reproduce our electronic system here is a simple video tutorial. Or if you just want to have fun with it don’t hesisate to check here.

So, we were able to collect data to determine the detection thresholds of our both sensors according to the distance. If you want to know more about threshold of hearing you can click here or read this article.
We collected our data and for a better visualization, we decided to represent them on an histogram.
Interpreting the data
We compared the sound detection of human ear and of FC-04 sound sensor according to the distance. We could observed on the histogram that from 7.20 m all participants heard the sound. However, at some points like 1.2m or 5.2m,  some participants had difficulties to hear the sound. It can be explained by the different ages of the participants. If you want to know more about age effect in hearing you can check this article. For our electronic system, we observed that our sound sensor was either detecting every sounds in the surrounding area or either detecting no sounds whatever the distance. It could be explained by the fact that the calibration of the sensibility threshold of the sound sensor wasn’t at all precise.
Critical analysis of the project
To conclude, we can say that the principal problem in our project was the sound sensor potentiometer . Indeed, the potentiometer was very sensitive which was problematic because it didn’t allows us to have precise sensibility thresholds.
During the experiment, we tried to change the potentiometer with an other. But we obtained results that were similar to the first one: the sensibility remained unchanged !
If we had to improve this project, we would like first to change the sensor and use another that sends analog values  so allows a more precise set up.
On an other hand, we would like to record the sound got by the sensor during the experiment because one of our mentors told us that sometimes, a LED could be on but too little for us to see it.


If you want to know more about ear sensibility and arduino sound sensor, here are some links:



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Written by Alexandra PERRON, Maryam ARIF, Margaux BIEUVILLE & Isabelle JOUSSET


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