Abstract
Chewing is thought to be important for normal swallowing, because the human chinbone is fixed on proper place by chewing. Therefore if this fixation is lost and the fulcrum of tongue movement vanishes, it becomes difficult to roll food bolus and saliva into pharynx by tongue. The purpose of this study is to develop a swallowing data logger system to monitor movements of prominentia laryngea and mandible in daily life to estimate the swallowing ability. In our system flexible polymer curvature sensors (FPCS), that converts its bending curvature to voltage, were used to measure their movement during swallowing. This data logger was smaller than our previous system, and it can measure the output voltage of this curvature sensor, and store them inside SD card equipped with. FPCSs were attached on the prominentia laryngea and the bulging of masseter in the vicinity of chinbone. This data logger has real time graph drawing function on PC display through communication line. At the next step normal swallowing will be compared with abnormal swallowing one with destabilizing chinbone by our new system.
