Laryngeal Motion Measurement During Swallowing Usings a PVDF Sensor

Swallowing is a vital process to obtain the necessary nutrients and liquids to stay healthy but as other parts of the body can experience malfunctions; Dysphagia refers to any difficulty or inability to swallow. It is estimated that dysphagia affects 8% of world population, affecting their quality of life but also can be deathly, so it is important to design systems in order to detect efficiently those problems. Actual swallowing analysis methods, such as Videofluoroscopy or endoscopy are expensive and invasive for the patient, so the development of low cost, non-invasive and automatic sensors will help an earlier detection of any swallowing problem.

Laryngeal motion has an important role in the swallowing process, so it has been previously analyzed in order to study swallowing. Piezoelectric sensors had been found to be effective to analyze swallowing, but still few steps have been performed to automatically analyze swallowing using piezoelectric sensors. In this research the objective was to realize an initial stage to get automatic swallowing analysis, this was done by measuring the effect of bolus content on the laryngeal motion. Also, in order to understand better the effect of the laryngeal motion on the sensor output, motion capture cameras were used and both outputs were compared.

An automatic measurement of the laryngeal duration was obtained using artificial neural networks with a success rate near 70%. In addition, different phases of the laryngeal motion were observed in the PVDF sensor signal that were also found to be affected by the bolus contents. The duration of these phases and other easily obtainable parameters from the PVDF signal could be used to automatically analyze swallowing in future.