Optically Sensing Tongue Gestures for Computer Input

Summary:
Spinal cord injuries and other medical conditions often leave some patients severely paralyzed. Many of these patients are however still capable of higher level thinking and possess the ability to communicate with other people if there was an opportunity to. In this paper optical sensors were embedded into an orthodontic dental retainer. These sensors provided the possibility for communication through tongue movement. The idea of wearing a retainer to communicate is a simple solution to design for each user, as well as low profile solution so that the user would not have a large apparatus to draw further attention to their disability. To build this retainer a physical impression of the mouth is needed first. Then a tinfoil separating material is placed on the material to release the retainer when it is complete. The four proximity sensors are then added to the retainer (left, right, front back) and embedded in acrylic. Desktop software was then created to recognize the tongue gestures and provide feeback for them in a real-time system. This system recognizes a left swipe, right swipe, tap up and hold up gesture. An experiment was then done to see how users would react to the use of the retainer. Several laboratory experiments as well as a game of tetris were all designed to test the device. It was discovered that the shape of the tongue at various points in the mouth is often not under control of the user. The current prototype is a wired model, which would not work for real world use, and a wireless version is now in the design process. Additional work is being put into monitoring other mouth activity such as: jaw tension, movement and even chemical changes in the saliva.

Discussion:
I thought this was a very interesting area of research. Although my idea would contain playing video games in class using my tongue, I do believe that this would be a beneficial thing to discover greater use for because it would allow disabled people to communicate in a new way. I think this was a well thought up paper because they included several ideas for the future, which all seem very promising.