An Independent Tongue-Operated Assistive System for Both Access and Mobility
Md Nazmus Sahadat, Shreyas Dighe, Fatima Z. Islam, Maysam Ghovanloo · IEEE Sensors Journal · 2018
People with tetraplegia often use multiple different assistive devices for access and mobility which requires constant caregiver assistance to help them replace these devices. In this paper, a new standalone tongue drive system (TDS) is designed which captures tongue gesture and generates commands to access both a computer and drive a wheelchair, using the same platform. Fifteen able-bodied participants completed a PC access and four power wheelchair (PWC) navigation tasks in comparison to keyboard arrow keys and joystick, respectively. An overall mean game score of TDS is 83.4% of arrow keys and improved 46.41% from first to last trials. Latched mode PWC driving was found to be the fastest (60.7% of joystick) and unlatched mode was the most accurate (2.3 × joystick error) among different TDS driving options. The average task completion time for wheelchair driving was 8.2% less compared to the previous studies on the same track.