Investigation into Wheelchair Mobility Control that Uses a Minimally Invasive Intra-Oral Palate Control Device utilising Resistopalatography Techniques

Interfacing with conventional wheelchair input devices is a major challenge when it comes to patients with high levels of disability. This paper intends to report on the new method of wheelchair mobility interfacing using Resistopalatog- raphy. The technique proposed here is based around utilising the tongue as the controlling muscle group to input desired movement into a force sensitive sensing dental retainer. Using the position of the force, and force applied a direction and speed metric can be calculated emulating conventional joystick output data. The resistopalatography technique has been applied to other Human Machine Interfacing areas with success [1].