The Computerized Diagnostic Rhyme Test as a Design Tool for Armored Vehicle Intercommunications Systems

The speech intelligibility of an intercom system (ICS) operated under realistic noise environment conditions is an extremely important parameter in determining the combat effectiveness of the armored vehicle crewman. Almost no evaluation of the intelligibility of the ICS is undertaken during its development phase. This may be due to naivete on the part of the government in requesting such work or on the contractor not wishing to spend the time and money necessary to perform a complete evaluation of system performance. Some testing is usually performed, but it is limited by lack of understanding of the armored vehicle noise environment and in some cases by the lack of the expensive facilities required to simulate the vehicle noise environment. The ASA standard speech intelligibility tests, such as ANSI S3.2-1960 (R1971) are cumber-some and very expensive to run. We wrote a fully automated, computerized Diagnostic Rhyme Test (DRT) to eliminate these problems. The DRT is performed in our Armored Vehicle Noise Environment Simulator, which can simulate all common armored vehicle noise environments in the U.S. Army inventory. Initial testing of the DRT and simulator began in January 1985 with the evaluation of the currently fielded AN/VIC-1 and three Vehicular Intercommunication System (VIS) Non-Developed Item (NDI) candidate ICS systems. The test system proved to be a valuable tool in the evaluation of these intercommunication systems under normal combat noise environment conditions.