Tongue Drive System is a an assistive technology
that would enable individuals that have
severe physical disabilities
to use their tongue motion
in order to do things, to go after their daily lives
so we can take advantage of the abilities of the tongue
in order to enable this person to
for example access computers, move a mouse cursor
on the screen or drive a wheelchair
The way Tongue Drive works is actually pretty simple idea, we
attach a tiny magnet on the tongue
towards the tip of the tongue, as the tongue moves,
we can sense the changes in the magnetic field.
And then, our headset
has a wireless connection to a smartphone that is worn
by the user. It can detect where and
in what direction, and at what location,
the tongue and this tiny magnet is, and
execute that that comment by sending the proper signals to the wheelchair
to follow my command.
This was our first study, both on able-bodied subjects
the able-bodied volunteers as well as people
with high level spinal cord injury, by high-level
these are individuals that are completely paralyzed from neck
down, in order to see how well it works compared to a
very popular assistive technology
the disabled subjects try to do the same task with the Tongue Drive System
and with Sip-N-Puff, and we looked at their performance
on average our results show that their performance with the Tongue Drive System
were
three times better than the Sip-N-Puff.
I have put it as my mission to
help ease these individuals to become more independent, it not only
lowers their health care costs, it is beneficial to the society,
it's beneficial to their family members and caregivers,
but most important of all, it is beneficial to themselves, because they
cannot go back to
how they were, but at least I can help them
to be more independent and self sufficient