Title:  Development and Evaluation of An Intraoral Tongue Operated Assistive Technology for People with Quadriparesis

Committee:

Dr. Gregory Durgin, ECE, Chair , Advisor

Dr. Omer Inan, ECE

Dr. Andrew Peterson, ECE

Dr. Ying Zhang, ECE

Dr. Hoseon Lee, Kennesaw State

Abstract:

This research is to develop a wireless intraoral tongue operated assistive technology for the people with disabilities, such as quadriplegia to improve the quality of their lives and do daily activities more efficiently and independently. The focus of this work has been designing a system, called intraoral Tongue Drive System (iTDS) that captures the tongue motions and convert them to a set of the user-defined commands to interact with smart devices. In this work, a high gain and small size intraoral antenna will be presented to enhance the intraoral wireless communication. Considering the noisy surroundings and the dynamic mouth environment, this work will also focus on solving these issues by developing a triple-band transmitter application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) chip equipped with an adaptive matching network. Besides these, a high accuracy signal processing algorithm will be implemented in the iTDS, making it as a stand-alone device, to process users’ inputs which are efficient to compute in a limited resource embedded hardware. This research will also focus on designing experiments to evaluate the learning abilities, pros and cons of this intraoral tongue operated assistive technology in accessing computers, using smartphones and driving the wheelchairs efficiently.