Preliminary Assessment of a Novel Intraoral-Tongue Operated Assistive Technology with Computer Interface

Assistive Technologies (ATs) are dedicated for the people who have severe physical disabilities to improve the quality of their lives by utilizing the users’ remaining abilities, such as head and eyeball movements. A novel intra-oral tongue operated assistive technology, called intraoral tongue drive system (iTDS), has been proposed to help the users live more independently. The latest iTDS is a stand-alone version by implementing the advanced signal processing algorithm to process the tongue commands locally and send out to the target devices, such as a personal computer. In this paper, the focus is the preliminary assessment of the stand-alone iTDS (s-iTDS). Four able-bodied subjects joined the study. Each subject completed two computer accessing tasks, center-out tapping and maze navigation, using s-iTDS for 5 sessions in total. The evaluation was compared with the previous TDS versions, including external TDS (eTDS) and multi-modal TDS (mTDS), and the golden standard, keyboard & mouse (KnM) combinations. The throughput of the center-out tapping task was reported as 2.23 bps using the latest s-iTDS, more than two times higher than the results of eTDS and mTDS. The error rate and miss target rate are 22.5% and 13.76%, respectively, demonstrating better performance among the presented TDS. In terms of the maze navigation task, 1.78 bps throughput was reported with s-iTDS.