Swallowscope: A smartphone based device for the assessment of swallowing ability

Dysphagia can cause serious challenges to both physical and mental health. Aspiration due to dysphagia is a major health risk that could cause pneumonia, and even death. As a result, monitoring and managing dysphagia is of utmost importance. This study investigates the development of a smartphone-based device and a feasible real-time swallowing sound processing algorithm for the automatic screening for swallowing ability. The videofluoroscopic swallow study (VFSS), which is considered the gold standard for the diagnosis of dysphagia, is not widely available, expensive and causes exposure to radiation. The screening tests used for dysphagia need to be carried out by trained staff and the evaluations are often non-quantifiable. The Swallowscope we developed is a wearable device based on mobile health, and uses the swallowing sound to quantitatively evaluate swallowing ability. As swallowing sound can be captured continuously and during activities of daily life with minimal intervention, it is an ideal approach to monitor swallowing activities, and its continuous monitoring has a better probability of capturing aspirations and risky swallow patterns. This paper describes the real-time smartphone based algorithm and the application we developed to monitor swallowing activities and evaluates the recognition accuracy by comparing them with VFSS evidence.