*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************
Title: Development and Evaluation of An Intraoral Tongue Operated Assistive Technology for People with Quadriparesis
Committee:
Dr. Durgin, Advisor
Dr. Peterson, Chair
Dr. Inan
Abstract:
The objective of the proposed research is to develop a wireless intraoral tongue operated assistive technology for the people with disabilities, such as quadriplegia to improve the quality of their lives and do daily activities more efficiently and independently. The focus of this work has been designing a system, called intraoral Tongue Drive System (iTDS) that captures the tongue motions and convert them to a set of the user-defined commands to interact with devices such as computers, smartphones, and wheelchairs. One of the design issues for intraoral devices is the weak communication between inside and outside the mouth. Therefore, this work will focus on developing a high gain and small size intraoral antenna to enhance the wireless communication. Considering the noisy surroundings and the dynamic mouth environment which adversely affects the wireless communication, this work will also focus on solving these issues by developing a triple-band transmitter application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) chip equipped with an adaptive matching network. Besides these, a high accuracy signal processing algorithm will be implemented in the iTDS, making it as a stand-alone device, to process users’ inputs which are efficient to compute in a limited resource embedded hardware. The proposed research will also focus on designing experiments to evaluate the pros and cons of this intraoral tongue operated assistive technology in accessing computers, using smartphones and driving the wheelchairs efficiently. The outcome of the proposed research is to test the hypothesis that the proposed iTDS has better performance compared with other tongue operated assistive technologies in accessing and controlling the three key targets: computers, smartphones, and wheelchairs.
