Tongue-controlled assistive technologies (ATs) have a great potential to improve the quality of life for people with severe disabilities. Current tongue-controlled ATs, however, require either a tracer to be attached on the tongue or a complicated gesture/mechanism to avoid issuing commands unintendedly during routine intraoral events (e.g., tongue resting, swallowing, and speaking), which poses a high entry barrier to potential users. In this study, we propose a tracer-free tongue-controlled AT using four optical distance sensors and one ambient light sensor with a multi-sensor data fusion algorithm to distinguish the intended tongue contacts from the unintended ones. Eleven healthy human subjects participated in the study to evaluate the performance using the proposed technology in masking unintendedly-issued commands and navigating a mouse cursor on a computer. The proposed multi-sensor data fusion algorithm could mask 100%, 86.99%, and 99.50% of unintendedly-issued commands during tongue resting, swallowing, and speaking, respectively. The efficacy of the tongue commands in mouse navigation was evaluated by command-issuing task and maze-navigation task. The participants could issue tongue commands in a random order with 97.16±0.94% of accuracy. The completion time and the sum of deviation of the maze-navigation task were 31.36±2.74 s and 9.38±0.85 pixel 2 , respectively. The subjects' performance on computer-access tasks, using the proposed tracer-free tongue-controlled technology, is at the level of the performance measured with existing tracer-based tongue-controlled technologies, while securing robustness in masking commands, unintendedly issued during routine intraoral events. Results of this preliminary study suggest that the tracer-free implementation is feasible option for the tongue-controlled ATs.

中文翻译：

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通过蜂窝网络下的中继辅助 D2D 通信增强物理层安全性


舌控辅助技术 (AT) 在改善严重残疾人的生活质量方面具有巨大潜力。然而，当前的舌控 AT 需要将示踪器附着在舌头上或需要复杂的手势/机制，以避免在日常口内活动（例如，舌头休息、吞咽和说话）期间无意中发出命令，这会导致较高的进入率对潜在用户的障碍。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种无示踪剂舌头控制 AT，使用四个光学距离传感器和一个环境光传感器以及多传感器数据融合算法来区分有意的舌头接触和无意的接触。十一名健康受试者参与了这项研究，以评估使用所提出的技术屏蔽无意发出的命令和在计算机上导航鼠标光标的性能。所提出的多传感器数据融合算法可以分别掩盖舌头休息、吞咽和说话期间无意发出的命令的 100%、86.99% 和 99.50%。通过命令发布任务和迷宫导航任务评估舌头命令在鼠标导航中的功效。参与者可以以随机顺序发出舌头命令，准确度为 97.16±0.94%。迷宫导航任务的完成时间和偏差总和分别为31.36±2.74 s和9.38±0.85 Pixel 2 。使用所提出的无示踪剂舌控技术，受试者在计算机访问任务中的表现处于使用现有基于示踪剂的舌控技术测量的性能水平，同时确保在日常工作中无意发出的掩蔽命令的鲁棒性口内事件。 这项初步研究的结果表明，无示踪剂实施对于舌控 AT 来说是可行的选择。