Development and Preliminary Assessment of an Arch-Shaped Stand-Alone Intraoral Tongue Drive System for People with Tetraplegia

Tongue Drive System (TDS), a wireless tongue-operated assistive technology (AT), was developed for people with tetraplegia to provide them a higher level of independence in performing daily tasks. We are presenting here a newly developed arch-shaped intraoral version of the TDS (iTDS) using commercial off-the-shelf components (COTS), which can completely hide the electronics inside the mouth. The iTDS, which is hermetically sealed in dental acrylic, is customized based on the users' oral anatomy to stably clasp onto their lower teeth, with electronics sitting in the buccal shelf area of the mouth. An intraoral antenna is designed at 2.4 GHz for robust wireless communication between iTDS and an external receiver (Rx). An efficient signal processing algorithm allows the iTDS to locally process the tongue commands and send them with only a few bytes to target devices, such as PC, smartphone, and wheelchair. In a preliminary pilot test, a subject performed a computer access task by issuing random commands over five sessions to evaluate the new iTDS. The highest mean correctly completed commands and the information transfer rate (ITR) were 99% and 148.9 bits/minute, which are very close to the outcomes obtained from the external TDS (eTDS).