Tongue-Controlled Wheelchair Outperforms Popular Sip-And-Puff System
After a 2009 diving accident left Jason DiSanto paralyzed from the neck down, he had to learn how to navigate life from a powered wheelchair, which he controls with a sip-and-puff system. Users sip or puff air into a straw mounted on their wheelchair to execute four basic commands that drive the chair. Results from a new clinical study suggest that sip-and-puff users like DiSanto could gain a higher level of independence with a tongue-controlled technology. In the study, paralyzed individuals used Georgia Tech's wireless and wearable Tongue Drive System to access computers and execute commands for their wheelchairs at much faster speeds than those recorded in sip-and-puff wheelchairs, but with equal accuracy. The Tongue Drive System is controlled by the position of the user's tongue. A magnetic tongue stud lets them use their tongue as a joystick to drive the wheelchair. Sensors in the tongue stud relay the tongue's position to a headset, which then executes up to six commands.
Transcript
00:00:06 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
00:00:43 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.
00:01:19 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
00:01:55 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
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