Novel percutaneous electrical stimulation method to effectively actuate the saliva secretion.

Abstract

The saliva secretion system has many important roles for our life, such as maintaining oral condition, smoothing speech, support eating and swallowing and others. The saliva section involves emotion and eating and drinking experience. Thus, digital technology to control saliva secretion would be an effective tool to affect VR experience. Previous studies conducted in the fields of dental health show that electrical stimulation inside or near the mouth promotes saliva secretion after long durational stimulation. However, in terms of VR use case, the effect should occur during stimulation and preferred to affect strongly. Therefore, we developed a novel stimulation method to effectively promote human saliva secretion using finite element analysis. And then, the effect of the stimulation method were quantitatively evaluated the effect during stimulation.