It appears to be a device for studying speech problems.
Check out this site pertaining to Haskins Lab:
http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/Haskins/Haskins/MISC/Facilities/Magnetom
etry.html
I copied the text from the site and its home page:
We use an Electromagnetic Midsagittal Articulometer system which was
designed at MIT and is known by the name EMMA (Perkell, Cohen, Svirsky,
Matthies, Garabieta & Jackson, 1992). EMMA is designed for adult subjects
who are seated in a chair. The system uses a three-coil transmitter assembly
attached to the head by means of a headband. These transmitter coils produce
alternating magnetic fields at three frequencies in the range from 50-75
kHz. Undue stress on the head and neck from the weight of the transmitter
assembly is prevented by a counterbalancing weight acting through a pulley
system attached to the ceiling. Receiver coils, approximately 1.5 x 1.5 x
1.0 mm in size, are attached to the subject's tongue, lips, jaw etc. by
means of a dental adhesive. The magnitudes of the alternating voltages
induced by the three transmitter coils provide position information which is
conveyed to the inputs of electronic amplifiers and discriminators by fine
wire leads. The rectified output voltages of the magnetometer, which
represent the distances of each receiver from each of the transmitter coils,
are subsequently input to a computer via an analog-to-digital converter.
Computer software is then employed to convert these voltages into sample by
sample positions in a Cartesian coordinate system.
The EMMA system provides inputs for ten receiver coils. Two of the ten
receivers are usually attached to fixed points on the subject's head such as
the maxilla and nasal bridge and are exclusively employed as reference
points. These reference receivers are monitored by the conversion software
which uses changes in their position to detect any unwanted head movement
with respect to the helmet and to correct the data from the other eight
receiver coils. In addition, the software provides the ability to rotate
and/or translate the origin of the coordinate system. Thus, if position data
are input from two other receivers attached to a Lucite bite plane (roughly
30mm apart) which is held between the subject's teeth (so defining the
occlusal plane), this information can be used to compute a transformation
that will relocate one of the bite-plane receivers to the origin of the
coordinate system and rotate the subject's occlusal plane into coincidence
with the x-axis. Subsequently this same transformation can be used to
translate and rotate all the x,y data obtained from an experiment to the new
coordinate location.
Haskins Laboratories:
Haskins Laboratories is a private, non-profit research laboratory founded in
1935, and named after its founder, Dr. Caryl P. Haskins. The Haskins
Laboratories have been continuously engaged in interdisciplinary basic
research for over fifty years. Under its previous Presidents, Dr. Franklin
S. Cooper (1955-1975), Dr. Alvin Liberman (1975-1986), and Dr. Michael
Studdert-Kennedy (1986-1992), the Laboratories did pioneering work on the
acoustics of speech, the development of speech synthesis and its application
to the study of speech perception. This commitment to state-of-the-art
research continues under our present President, Dr. Carol A. Fowler.
We are located in Connecticut and are affiliated with Yale University and
the University of Connecticut. Many of our research associates have academic
positions at other universities including Wesleyan, CUNY, URI, The Hebrew
University, and others. We also have a cooperative agreement with the ATR
Research Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan. Currently, most of the Laboratories'
research projects are focused on problems in human communication. Our main
areas of research include speech perception, synthesis and analysis, speech
production, motor behavior, linguistics, phonetics, reading, cognitive
science, ecological psychology, nonlinear dynamics and complexity, etc.
-----Original Message-----
From: Leland Torrence [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, February 18, 1999 9:47 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Watching what you say?
Does anyone know what a Electromagnetic Midsagittal Articulometer is?
Best,
Leland
|
