SMRT’s Thomson-East Coast Line (TEL)

Thomson-East Coast Line – Woodlands Station
Image by DreamsTime.com
In Singapore, travelling via public transport, either by bus or train is the de facto. This means that occasionally, there will be a surge of human traffic demand and the existing supply of public transport are unable to keep up with the masses, hence, a sixth line in Singapore’s MRT network, the Thomson-East Coast Line (TEL) was first introduced by the Land Transport Authority (LTA) in August 2014, meant to relieve crowding on the East-West and North-South Lines.
ST Engineering has been heavily involved with the integration of the various systems as required and one of the systems that ST Engineering was tasked to include was Hearing Enhancement System (HES), hence, they have reached out to The Listening Lab to provide assistance with the implementation of HES at the Paid and Unpaid side of the Passenger Service Counters (PSC) in every station. Although the required HES solution were only counter systems, it proved to be a daunting challenge to The Listening Lab in the initial stages since the construction of the PSCs comprises of metals.
When metals are being introduced in close proximity to an induction loop, it has a significant impact and would mean that the amount of power required would be greater, resulting in an upgrade to a more powerful loop driver or amplifier. The effect, also known as Metal Loss, metal has towards induction loops is that it would re-radiate an opposing magnetic field and cancelling out some of the loop signal generated by the induction loop, resulting in weakening of the Field Strength and loss of high frequencies that results in a dull or muffled sound. Severity of Metal Loss is affected by how conductive the metal is and how close it is to the loop.
The default method of a counter loop installation would be to mount it directly onto the vertical surface of the counter which happens to be the same for all TEL Stations. Since the counter loop will be directly mounted onto a metal surface and being aware of the adverse effects on Metal Loss, The Listening Lab initiated to conduct a Metal Loss Test to evaluate the severity and make the necessary changes to ensure that it would be able to comply to the IEC 60118-4 Standard. As expected, the metal loss test results showed that the performance of the signal generated by an Ampetronic CLD1 counter loop driver is insufficient to comply to the Standard mentioned earlier and eventually leading to the decision to upgrade to a more powerful Ampetronic C5-1N loop driver and also changing the size of the induction loop to overcome the Metal Loss. ST Engineering, accompanied with The Land Transport Authority (LTA), were present at TE6 Mayflower Station to witness the demonstration of the C5-1N Loop Driver which overcame the Metal Loss that was profound.

Default method of mounting a counter loop
With the seal of approval from LTA, The Listening Lab proceeded to supply and implement counter loops for all thirty-one TEL Stations in multiple phases starting from TEL1, consists of two Stations (Woodlands North & Woodlands Station), TEL2 consisting six stations (Woodlands South to Caldecott Station), TEL3 consisting of thirteen stations (Mount Pleasant to Gardens By The Bay Station), TEL4 consisting of eight stations (Founders’ Memorial to Bayshore Station) and TEL5 (Bedok South & Sungei Bedok Station).
Since TEL opens up in multiple phases, prior to the official opening to the general public, LTA and ST Engineering have reached out to multiple organisations where people with accessibility needs like the blind, wheelchair-bound individuals, and the Hearing Impaired from the Singapore Association of the Deaf (SADeaf), to experience first-hand and verify that the available accessibility features found in TEL stations are functioning well for others like themselves. The Listening Lab gave their support to ST Engineering for the demonstration and clarified some queries that the Hearing-Impaired participants had all while having a staff from the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) present to witness and gather feedback from the participants with accessibility needs.

Staff from The Listening Lab introducing and sharing of
Hearing Enhancement System at TEL3’s Marina Bay Station

The Founder of The Listening Lab assisting a Hearing Aid
user from SADeaf at TEL4’s Marine Parade demonstration
To summarise, all TEL Stations from Woodlands North to Bayshore Station have Hearing Enhancement Systems installed at the Paid and Unpaid Passenger Service Counters. Hearing Aid and Cochlear Implant users with their Telecoil components enabled, are able to take advantage of these available Hearing Enhancement Systems to communicate better and efficiently with the staff from SMRT whenever required. However, for those who have issues turning on their Telecoil mode, please refer back to your respective audiologists for assistance.
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