A Proposal of Audio Playback Control System for Monitoring Operations

Monitoring operations are required in various kinds of industries including printing processes and medical cares, and most of them are dependent on operators' visual tracking of sensor signals. In medical cares, pulse sounds synchronized with ECG signals or alarm sounds indicating emergent events are currently used for bedside monitors. These simple audio signals are helpful for medical staff and give great advantage to quality of cares. We propose extending this idea to general monitoring operations utilizing MIDI technology so that we should monitor sensor signals through their synchronized MIDI sounds by the following two methods. The first one called Direct Real-time Playback is converting the source signals to MIDI notes, and the second one called Indirect Stored Playback is modulating a given MIDI music notes by the source. In this paper, we describe our proposed concept of playback control system including these two MIDI playback methods and a networked remote playback method, and present two software implemented prototypes based on these proposed structures for a printing application and a medical application.