 High-performance noise-canceling technology is literally music to our ears. It helps deliver the booming basslines and crisp melodies as intended by the studio creatives that dreamed them up. But it could potentially save lives as well. Researchers from Northern Illinois University have designed new tech that blocks harmful noise from entering infant incubators. That technology could prove critical to the health of the countless fragile newborns admitted to neonatal intensive care units each year. Plants in neonatal intensive care units, or NICUs, are extremely sensitive to their surroundings. Numerous studies have shown that high-intensity noise can alter vital signs such as heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure. While noise reduction programs have targeted staff behavior and recommended minor structural modifications, the NICU environment remains less than ideal. For the research team from Northern Illinois, that situation calls for a hard-wired solution. Their design features an active noise cancellation system, much like that found in popular headphones. That system works by picking up ambient noise through a reference microphone, calculating an anti-noise signal, and blasting the ambient noise with that signal to cancel it out before it reaches the listener. The approach tends to work well when the position of the noise source is known, but that's hardly the case for the dynamic NICU environment. To solve that problem, the team incorporated an array of microphones. The system uses that array to guess where the disturbance is coming from and sets the nearest microphone to it as the reference mic. This flexibility helps maximize the amount of noise that is ultimately canceled out. The team tested their setup on a real incubator with recorded NICU noise played over a loudspeaker. Their system was able to locate the loudspeaker correctly 85% of the time and could reduce noise levels by up to about 12 decibels. Given that the recommended noise intensity level for NICUs is 45 decibels, that reduction could be crucial in many hospital settings. More work is needed before the system can be deployed in real NICUs. For example, it remains to be seen whether the approach can be adapted to a moving noise source, but the initial results are encouraging. With further improvements, the system could help deliver much-needed protection to delicate newborns during the critical stages of their development.