Development of the Non-contact Tongue Recognition System and its Application to Tongue Training

Abstract

Tongue and mouth related muscle are essential to keep a person's Quality of Life (QoL). However, those muscles are often declined due to aging and/or a certain kinds of disease such as Down Syndrom. That leads variety of symptoms such as speech and swallowing disorders. To comply with this issue, many kinds of tongue-mouth muscle training methods have been proposed. However, most of them are monotonic and have a problem with the continuity. In this research, we develop SITA (Simple Interface for Tongue motion Acquisition) system, which enables measuring tongue motion without wearing any device. This measuring system also enables to develop interactive training game for tongue and mouth muscle. In this paper, we describe the detail of SITA system and tongue muscle training game.