Stick it in your ear
Abdelkareem Bedri, David R. Byrd, Peter Presti, Himanshu Sahni, Zehua Gue, Thad E. Starner · 2015
The human ear seems to be a rigid anatomical part with no apparent activity, yet many facial and body activity can be measured from it. Research apparatuses and commercial products have demonstrated the capability of monitoring hart rate, tongue activities, jaw motion and eye blinking from the ear. In this paper we describe the design and the implementation of the Outer Ear Interface (OEI) which utilizes a set of infrared proximity sensors to measure the deformation in the ear canal caused by the lower jaw movement. OEI has been used in different applications that requires tracking of jaw activity which includes silent speech recognition, jaw gesture detection and food intake monitoring.