An Independent Tongue-Operated Assistive System for Both Access and Mobility

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.