Abstract
Tongue pressure plays a critical role in the oral and pharyngeal stages of swallowing, contributing considerably to bolus formation and manipulation as well as to safe transporting of food from the mouth to the stomach. Smooth swallowing relies not only on effective coordination of respiration and pharynx motions but also on sufficient tongue pressure. Conventional methods of measuring tongue pressure involve attaching a pressure sheet to the hard palate to monitor the force exerted by the tongue tip against the hard palate. In this study, an air bulb was inserted in the anterior oral cavity to monitor the pressure exerted by the extrinsic and intrinsic muscles of the tongue. The air bulb was integrated into a noninvasive, multisensor approach to evaluate the correlation of the tongue pressure with other swallowing responses, such as respiratory nasal flow, submental muscle movement, and thyroid cartilage excursion. An autodetection program was implemented for the automatic identification of swallowing patterns and parameters from each sensor. The experimental results indicated that the proposed method is sensitive in measuring the tongue pressure, and the tongue pressure was found to have a strong positive correlation with the submental muscle movement during swallowing.
Highlights
Accepted: 2 April 2021Swallowing is a reflectional process that requires effective coordination among respiration, tongue pressure, submental muscle reaction, and pharyngeal movement on the swallowing path
The sex factor was confirmed to have a main effect on the nasal airflow pause duration (TNAir) (p = 0.017), but this effect was not observed for the age factor (p = 0.172)
The results revealed a strong positive correlation between the tongue pressure onset duration (Ttongue ) and the surface electromyography (sEMG) duration (TsEMG ), with r values ranging from 0.532 to 0.717
Summary
Accepted: 2 April 2021Swallowing is a reflectional process that requires effective coordination among respiration, tongue pressure, submental muscle reaction, and pharyngeal movement on the swallowing path. The swallowing path is typically divided into three stages: oral, pharyngeal, and esophageal. The bolus descends into the esophagus, and respiration is resumed. Numerous diseases, such as neurological disease, neuromuscular disorder, chronic indigestion disorder, gastroesophageal reflux disease, or cancer of the head and neck, might impair this coordination and cause swallowing dysfunction [1,2]. A typical symptom of swallowing dysfunction is residual food or liquid on the swallowing path, necessitating additional swallowing. This symptom may occur at any stage of the aforementioned diseases and lead to sensorimotor disorder, choking, aspiration, or potential complications. If the swallowing dysfunction is not treated adequately, those complications may deteriorate and result in dehydration, malnutrition, choking injuries, aspiration pneumonia, or even death [3]
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