Movement of the Tongue During Target Reaching on a 2-Dimensional Surface

The tongue's physiological complexity and hidden location inside the oral cavity, limit our ability to quantify its fast and dynamic motions. Our team has developed a discreet wireless intraoral wearable device to study the tongue motion. In this paper, tongue movements were analyzed during functional tasks of target reaching when controlling a cursor on a computer screen. Ten healthy individuals participated in this study. Movement trajectories were compared to straight lines using the maximum perpendicular distance error. Results suggest that the tongue directs the cursor closer to a straight line when moving along the anteroposterior and mediolateral direction. We also observed that with practice the movement error along the mediolateral axis decreases more than the error for the anteroposterior and angular movements.