Evaluation of a Non-Personalized Optopalatographic Device for Prospective Use in Functional Post-Stroke Dysphagia Therapy

Objective:
Stroke survivors commonly suffer from dysphagia, originating from oro-facial impairments which affect swallowing function. Functional therapy often employs tongue exercises that require the patient to perform short motion sequences. Evaluating the patient's performance on those exercises is difficult, because there is no reliable form of visual feedback.
Methods:
We propose an optopalatographic device that does not require a personalized dental retainer and is capable of measuring tongue movement trajectories intraorally. The device features nine optical proximity sensors at 100 Hz and is fixated against the hard palate with a specifically developed palatal adhesive. The sensing capabilities of the device were evaluated on a tongue gesture corpus recorded from nine healthy individuals, containing eight different tongue exercises commonly used in functional dysphagia therapy.
Results:
The measured tongue trajectories contained temporally and spatially resolved information about the tongue movement and location during each exercise. Furthermore, a simple DTW-kNN classifier was able to distinguish the exercises from one another with an average classification accuracy of 97.9 % and 61.4 % (cross-validation and inter-speaker test accuracy, respectively).
Conclusion:
the device can provide real-time feedback for tongue motion and we obtained promising gesture recognition results with relatively few sensors, even in the absence of a personalized dental retainer.
Significance:
Non-personalized optopalatography is readily available and could aid in improving functional dysphagia therapy by providing visual feedback to both the physician and patient.