Narrow pickup pattern mic recommendations

ChrisRG

This is a bit of a strange use case but hopefully they'll be some pearls of wisdom out there.

I've got a work project in which I need to find a way of picking up normal conversation audio in a room where there are multiple sources.
Our normal product involves a sensitive boundary mic that's designed to pickup all the audio from a room and it does it very well.  A customer has a use case where multiple mics will be needed in a large room.  Picture a training environment for healthcare where there is a ward with 3 or 4 beds and conversations happening around each bed. We need to pickup the audio from around each bed with minimal bleed from the other areas.

I've got a cheap shotgun mic arriving to start running some tests but I though I'd see whether anyone here had any mic recommendations.  I need a narrow pickup pattern (presumably) and the mic will ideally be mounted to the ceiling above the beds.  We've already ruled out lapel mics and the mic can be phantom powered and will need an XLR/mini XLR connection.

Cheers

Sporky

Beyer MPR210 has a coridoor pattern pickup.

Or something like a Shure MXA910 where you can set up to eight lobes and get individual Dante channels for each, but they're spendy. 

ChrisRG

@Sporky Thanks for the ideas.  At the moment, it's a proof of concept test but that corridor pattern looks interesting.  I hadn't even heard of that type before.

It also needs to be a single channel solution (although I'd love an excuse to play around with Dante).  For context, the mic is connected directly to a 360 deg IP camera.  We have a camera and mic setup for each bed.