Bio-Inspired Robotic Swallowing Simulator

The development of food products that are safe whilst also nutritious and sustainable is a key challenge for the food industry. However, evaluating the safety of food, and in particular swallowing safety, is a fundamental challenge to ensure safety, perception, and nutritional contributions. This becomes especially complex when ethical considerations preclude the use of human panels for certain demographics like children, the elderly, and the ill, or when assessing disruptive food technologies such as cultivated products. To address this challenge, we propose the development of a robotic swallowing simulator that emulates the swallowing process, leveraging soft actuation of the tongue and epiglottis to simulate the swallowing of chewed ‘bolus’. By showing the sensitivity of the robot to the viscosity of bolus, and tilt angle, we show the ability to capture similar responses to humans. This provides some first insights into developing robotic means of evaluating swallowing safety, and how soft robotic technologies can be deployed to achieve this goal.