A Training System for Swallowing Ability by Visualizing the Throat Position

Our ability to swallow tends to decrease as we grow older. One reason for this is dysphagia, a condition that makes it difficult to swallow food well and causes malnutrition or food aspiration in severe cases. Therefore, preventing dysphagia is important in terms of maintaining quality of life. One way to prevent dysphagia is by using a throat raising exercise whereby we train our own throat muscles by consciously moving the throat. However, throat raising can be difficult because it is hard to see the motion of our own throat. In this work, we developed a system that helps users to move their own throat consciously. We designed a wearable device to visualize larynx position and a game to enhance user motivation. The proposed device measures the distance between skin surface and photo-reflective sensors and estimates the position of the larynx by means of a support vector machine. Experimental results showed that our proposed system can accurately estimate throat motion and that four out of five participants improved their ability to keep their throat in a high position for a long time by playing our proposed game. In future work, we will consider a system that can improve not only the muscle strength of the throat but also the comprehensive swallowing function.