Basic Study of Swallowing Evaluation System by Electromyography, Swallowing Sounds, and Ultrasonic Pulse Doppler Waveform

Abstract

Aspiration caused by an impaired swallowing can cause choking and aspiration pneumonia. Conventional swallowing assessments are often invasive and lack quantitative evaluation. This study investigated the feasibility of a noninvasive and quantitative swallowing evaluation system based on the simultaneous measurement of electromyography, swallowing sounds, and esophageal Doppler waveforms.
Characteristic events were extracted from each signal and their occurrence times were analyzed under different swallowing conditions. The experimental results demonstrate that changes in the physical properties of the swallowed samples affect the temporal relationships among the detected events. These findings suggest that the proposed multimodal measurement system can capture tissue behavior and bolus movement during swallowing and has the potential to quantitatively assess the swallowing function.