Case Study: Award-Winning Javierian Simulation Centre - Powered by AREC & Integracion AV

Dear ADENA Partners, this month we have an exciting case study from the Pontifical Javieriana University in Colombia. Our partner, Integracion AV, renovated the simulation centre for medical education at the university in a project which won the Cala Awards 2024. By equipping the entire floor with AREC, Shure, Crestron, Liberty, Netgear, and other devices, the case demonstrates how simple it is to create sophisticated yet intuitive solutions for the real-time study and simulation of medical procedures using our products.

The Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Pontifical Javieriana University) is a prestigious private university based in Bogotá, Colombia. It is one of the oldest and most renowned universities in the country, consisting of 18 schools with 61 departments and offering 242 academic programmes across a variety of disciplines. Among its alumni are a former President of Colombia, government ministers from across Latin America, producers, Olympic champions, scientists, and many more.

One of the university’s strongest schools is the Faculty of Medicine. It is a leading medical school based on the main campus, with most practical training taking place at the Hospital Universitario San Ignacio. The school is renowned for its clinical simulation centre, one of the first of its kind in Colombia. Originally founded in 2007, the centre was first equipped with traditional simulation laboratories. However, this changed recently when the school decided to renovate the centre with modern educational tools to meet current global training needs. Thanks to the efforts of our partner, Integracion AV, they secured the best solution available. 

The clinical simulation centre occupies an entire floor and is divided into six sections: multiple doctors’ offices and training rooms, critical care units, a monitoring and control room, patient observation rooms and surgery rooms. The university wanted to provide a way to conduct operations in every room simultaneously, record them for later study, while ensuring it is simple to monitor the processes and have two-way live communication between senior doctors and students.

Each doctor’s office was equipped with the same solution with the AREC LS-410 at its core — a 4-channel Media Station with 4K, Dante, NDI|HX support, and many other features. All stations were installed in a server room and connected to the same network using Netgear GSM4248 PX-100NAS switches. The LS-410 effectively combined images from each video source installed in the offices, starting with the RADA A-TC02 OnyxCam AI Tracking camera and an AREC CI-22H PTZ camera via NDI and ONVIF protocols. While the OnyxCams were installed to track doctors in these rooms, the CI-22H cameras were used to show specific presets, such as the examination table with a practice mannequin, a patient's chair, and other areas of the rooms. Computers in each room were connected to the LS-410 stations using Liberty IPEX 5001 encoders and 5002 decoders, safely delivering their audio and video via the network. Conversation audio was captured Shure MXA-710 ceiling microphones and sent to the LS-410 via Dante, while a Crestron DSP-1281 with Fohhn MA-4.100 were used to output audio commentary coming from the supervising instructors, along with computer audio, through Audac CENA speakers. The combined audio and video, as well as each individual video source, was recorded by the LS-410 and immediately available for review by the university, greatly simplifying the media production process.

LS-410 Media Station

A-TC02 OnyxCam AI Tracking

CI-22H PTZ Camera

Other training rooms, critical care units, surgery rooms, and patient observation rooms followed the same basic solution concept but added additional features. For instance, each training room included an extra Liberty decoder, capable of displaying computers, vital signs monitors, and other sources on local LG displays. Each critical care unit used four cameras and two Media Stations, with one of the stations displayed on a local screen. In patient observation rooms, even more cameras, media stations, and other equipment — including a DS-X01 Media Decoder — were used to accommodate the needs of multiple concurrent simulations.

DS-X01 Media Decoder

DS-X09 Media Decoder

In addition to cameras and media stations, surgery rooms featured DS-X09 Media Decoders. These devices displayed multiple network cameras and IP sources in customisable layouts, helping doctors evaluate operations from different angles. Crestron control panels were also installed, allowing them to easily manage all AREC and other devices in the room from a single touch panel.

Lastly, the monitoring and control room, staffed by instructors and senior doctors, was equipped primarily with numerous DS-X09 Media Decoders. Using AREC Multi-view Maker software on computers in this room, doctors could dynamically change which network sources they viewed. Wearing Avantree Quartet headsets and using Shure tabletop microphones, doctors relayed instructions to students and ensured they were followed immediately by observing the process through camera and Media Station livestreams displayed on the DS-X09. 

The masterful execution of this large AV-over-IP installation earned our partner Integracion AV international recognition at the Cala Awards 2024, winning the competition for Best AV Project of the Year. You can watch the project description video made by the Integracion AV team here and a general overview here.

We extend our gratitude to the Integracion AV team and Juan Carlos Gutierrez for the continued trust in and choice of AREC to meet their customers’ AV needs.

Is your local medical university or hospital looking to renovate or build a simulation centre? Contact us at www.a-dena.com to discuss how AREC solutions can create a truly immersive and impressive experience for your customers.

ADENA Hack: How to hide the GUI on AREC stations?

Every AREC Media Station from versions 2.6 and newer comes with an inbuilt way to control it — the graphical user interface, shortened to GUI. We covered this interface in detail in the very first ADENA Hack, and mentioned additions to it in subsequent posts. GUI can be opened and closed easily by left-clicking anywhere away from it with a computer mouse or by touching on a USB-connected interactive display. You can also use the dedicated hide/show buttons in the corners of the GUI. Starting from firmware versions 2.11 and on stations with the MCU version 4.3 or 4.4, it is now also possible to completely disable the GUI until it is needed again. To do so, open the “Administrator” web page of your station, go to “Media I/O” -> “Display”. You will find two settings dedicated to this: “OSD Menu'' and “OSD Menu - Playback Video”. Toggling off “OSD Menu” will shut down the GUI until this option is toggled on. Toggling off only “OSD Menu - Playback Video” will keep the GUI, but remove the playback feature from it. If you want to keep the GUI available, but remove the ability for your operators to see previously recorded videos, make sure to toggle off this option.

As of May 2024, the option to completely disable the GUI is available on LS-2, LS-200, LS-300, LS-400, LS-410, LS-860 and KL-3T models, with plans to include it in LS-110 and LS-US2 in the coming months. Would you like to know more about this or other AREC Media Station features? Make sure to reach out to us at www.a-dena.com and we will be happy to arrange a call with you!

ADENA Hack: How to use Dante Audio to connect Yamaha Adecia Solutions and other Dante-enabled products to AREC LS-410?

AREC LS-410 is the first of our Media Stations to support Dante Audio. In case you do not know this protocol, Dante Audio, created by Audinate, is a network protocol that is used by more than 4,000 products and 600 AV brands. The protocol makes it very easy to send audio using standard network environments and is essential when it comes to AV-over-IP setups.

We will use Yamaha Adecia Conferencing Solutions, represented by our Polish distributor Kontel, to give an example of how Dante systems are typically connected. The first step is to download the Dante Controller software from Audinate’s website. Simply run it and select which network to scan for Dante devices. You will then see a list of found Dante-enabled receiver and transmitter devices. By default, LS-410 will be recognised as “ARECDEP”, followed by a hyphen and the last 6 digits of its MAC address. This name can be changed using the Dante Controller application.

If your device does not appear in the list, you should check whether Dante is enabled on your device and if it is properly connected to the correct network. On the LS-410, Dante is always enabled, whereas for Yamaha, you can check by running the RM device finder tool and then accessing the webpage of your RM-CR conference processor.

Once you log in, proceed to the Peripheral Settings page. You can either let the processor automatically route all Dante connections by ticking the associated box or do it manually.

Furthermore, you can navigate to the Audio Processing page to customise the audio channels processed by the RM-CR and how they are sent out.

Coming back to the Dante Controller tool, as you can see in our example picture above, AREC LS-410 is both a receiver and a transmitter, supporting 2 input and 2 output channels. These channels can work simultaneously. Apart from the station, the table lists different elements of the Yamaha Adecia conferencing solution, including RM-CG ceiling microphone array, RM-CR conference processor, RM-WAP wireless access point for DECT microphones, and VXL1 speakers. Each listed channel is mono, and on AREC, channel 1 is predefined to be left, whereas channel 2 is right. In the case of Yamaha RM-CR, channels can be customised to be either left or right, making it easy to ensure you have the right stereo setup for your purposes.

As for selecting Dante audio sources on the LS-410, generally, there are two ways you can do this. The first is to simply tick the box on the intersection between the receiver channel 1 or 2 of the LS-410 with the transmitter device you would like to connect. You can use both channels simultaneously, and in our case, we have an output of the RM-CG ceiling microphone sent to channel 2 and the RM-CR audio processor to channel 1. You can hover over the connection coordinate to see an information popup, making it clear which device will be transmitting to which receiver.

The other way you can do this is by double-clicking on the LS-410 in the “Receivers” column. This will open the “Device View” page, where you will see which channel of your receiver is using audio from which transmitter.

Simply drag the necessary channel from the right side of this page onto your desired channel to establish the connection

You can use the “Device View” page to configure your LS-410 as a transmitter as well by clicking on “Transmit”. Drag the output channels of your LS-410 to the receiving devices to hear the LS-410 audio output there. For example, you can send the combined stereo output of LS-410 to Yamaha VXL speakers, or to any other audio processor.

And that’s all there is to it. Using Dante, you are able to unite all kinds of professional AV hardware with just a network cable, ensuring smooth setups that save costs and improve the user experience. Would you like to know more about the LS-410 or other AREC products? Contact us at www.a-dena.com for a free presentation or a consultation on your project needs.

Also, we would like to extend our gratitude to Tomasz Stajniak and the Kontel team for collaborating with us on this post. Make sure to contact them at www.kontel.pl to arrange an in-person demonstration of all AREC, Yamaha, and other brands’ product lines in Poland.