Exploded view of electronic components, a touch sensor array, a 3D printed mouthguard, and encapsulation structures. Credit: Hou et al.
Recent technological advances have enabled the development of a wide range of electronic devices designed to improve people’s quality of life and help them perform their daily activities. Most of the existing devices operate via touch screens, keyboards, mouse pads, and other manual interfaces.
Researchers at the National University of Singapore have developed a smart mouthguard that could allow people to operate their devices using their mouths, rather than their fingers. The new device, presented in a paper published in Natural electronicscould also allow dentists to collect medical data from inside their patients’ mouths and help monitor athletes’ recovery or improve their performance.
“Our paper was inspired by the need to develop more intuitive and accessible assistive technologies for people with mobility disabilities,” Xiogang Liu, supervising author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.
“Conventional input devices, such as touchscreens or speech recognition, are often difficult to use in certain environments or for users with limited hand functions. Our goal was to develop a more flexible and user-friendly interface that can be operated using the tongue and teeth, which are capable of precise and fatigue-free movements.”
The main goal of Liu and his colleagues’ recent research was to address the limitations of existing human-computer interfaces by creating an adaptable, mouth-based wearable device that is minimally invasive yet effective in allowing users to control their devices in a variety of complex ways. This idea led to the development of a tactile mouth pad (O-pad) with integrated tactile sensor arrays, flexible circuits, and AI integration.
The smart mouthguard they designed is equipped with soft but sensitive sensors. These sensors allow users to perform various tasks, including keyboarding, gaming, and wheelchair navigation, using the movements of their tongue and teeth, instead of tapping or swiping their fingers on a touchscreen.
“The wearable touch mouth pad we developed works similarly to a touch screen (e.g., an iPad), but can be controlled by tongue movements and teeth bites,” Liu explained.
“It’s a set of composite sensors made of carbon nanotubes and silicone embedded in a flexible, biocompatible pad that fits inside the mouth. When the tongue slides over the pad, it mimics the movements of fingers on a touchscreen, and when the teeth bite down on the pad, it acts like a mouse click.”
The wearable device developed by the researchers detects tongue movements and tooth pressure using a set of sensors. The device is also lightweight, flexible and cost-effective, which could facilitate its commercialization and real-world deployment.
“Our device enables complex control using both tongue and tooth movements,” Liu said.
“This dual-action capability allows users to perform tasks such as keyboarding, gaming, and wheelchair navigation with great accuracy and ease. The use of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) further enhances the device’s ability to recognize patterns, making it highly effective at translating tongue and tooth movements into precise control commands.”
The smart mouthguard that Liu and his colleagues are presenting could have many applications. In particular, it could enable people with physical disabilities to interact with their electronic devices in simple and intuitive ways, such as allowing them to independently write text messages, answer phone calls, move around in a wheelchair or browse the Internet.
“It could also find applications in environments where traditional capture methods are impractical, such as sterile surgical environments or where contamination risks are high,” Liu said.
The team’s O-pad touchscreen device could also be used in dentistry, where it could help monitor teeth, as well as in speech therapy and sports, where it could be used to track recovery or test motor coordination. Finally, the device could enable a new form of biometric identification, allowing users to securely access their devices or accounts using their teeth.
“In the future, we plan to further optimize the tactile mouth pad for a wider range of applications by improving its sensor array for even more complex movements,” Liu added.
“We also want to improve the comfort and portability of the device for extended use and explore its potential in areas such as prosthetic control and robotics. Finally, we plan to conduct larger clinical trials to evaluate its ease of use and effectiveness in real-world conditions, particularly for people with severe mobility impairments.”
More information:
Bo Hou et al, A carbon nanotube-based tactile mouthpad for multimodal haptic interaction, Natural electronics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-024-01234-9.
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