Swallowing monitoring
Swallowing appears more accessible than chewing since it involves the neck (pharyngeal) region, rather than the head. Our early investigations were focused on EMG and strain sensing collars. EMG sensors at submental and hyoid positions showed sufficient signal quality for detection of swallows due to the muscle contractions at the neck. However, the relevant muscles are in deep layers of the neck and signals are filtered by head movement muscles (Sternocleidomastoid). Strain at the neck could be detected due to hyoid movement during swallowing. However, the signal quality highly depends on the prominence of the hyoid.
Later investigations concentrated on a combination of EMG and vibration signals to compensate for errors in the swallowing detection. Besides the swallowing event, the swallowed material (bolus) influences the signals. We investigated viscosity and volume.
Publications
, "Methods for Detection and Classification of Normal Swallowing from Muscle Activation and Sound", PHC 2006: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, ICST, November 2006.
, "Estimating exercise execution quality from garment-integrated sensors", Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair, 2008.
, "Gesture controlled user input to complete questionnaires on wristworn watches", HCII 2009: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Springer, 2009.
Contact
Prof. Dr. Oliver Amft
- Job title: Director
- Phone number: +49 9131 85-23601