CAREER: Brain-Tongue-Computer Interfacing

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The PI's long-term research plans involve exploring new pathways to the human central nervous system (CNS) in order to expand our knowledge about this highly complex system and understand how it works, and developing innovative technologies and research tools that will enable direct or indirect communication with the CNS through such pathways. In particular, he is keen to utilize and evaluate new interfacing technologies in devices that will help individuals who suffer from chronic disabilities and neurological diseases, such as blindness, deafness, and paralysis to improve and extend their quality of life. With these general goals in mind, the PI will in this project focus on exploring the use of voluntary tongue motion as a substitute for some of the functions traditionally performed by the arms and hands in personal environmental control. This has not been possible in the past absent access to tongue motion without impeding the tongue's key roles in swallowing, respiration, and speech. The PI has previously developed and successfully tested a new wireless, unobtrusive, and wearable technology he calls the Tongue Drive System (TDS), to indicate tongue position in real time within certain user-defined locations in the oral space. Building upon the TDS prototype, he will explore whether the inherent characteristics of the tongue and its rich motor capabilities can be harnessed as an intermediary pathway to the human brain. In other words, he will seek to create a Brain-Tongue-Computer Interface (BTCI) by enhancing the functionality of the TDS hardware, signal processing algorithms, and GUI software to support a large number of choices that will be simultaneously available to users, in addition to the proportional control capability that is currently employed to facilitate navigation and computer access. The PI will conduct experiments to evaluate the performance, usability, and acceptability of the BCTI platform, and will employ it to achieve a fundamental understanding of human factors associated with voluntary tongue motions. Finally, the PI will combine his real time 3-D tongue tracking technology with multi-channel wireless neural recording to explore the relationship between unconstrained tongue movements and whole muscle/single motor unit activities in speech, respiration, and swallowing without any bodily restraints.Broader Impacts: Individuals who are severely disabled as a result of various causes from spinal cord injuries to stroke, cerebral palsy, and ALS find it extremely difficult to carry out everyday tasks without continuous help. This research will ultimately transform the lives of many persons with severe disabilities, by helping them live active, self-supportive, and productive lives. Solutions such as the BTCI may also help reduce healthcare and assisted-living costs by relieving the burden on family members and dedicated caregivers. Utilization of the tongue's motion as an untapped human motor modality in command, control, and navigation tasks involves costs and benefits which are at present unknown; quantitative analysis of human performance in concurrently conducted sensory, motor, and cognitive tasks, both in the presence and absence of tongue motions, is likely to bring about new scientific discoveries in human system integration. The PI's 3-D tongue tracking technology will also impact speech/language therapy, as well as the treatment of communication and sleep disorders that involve tongue motion. The PI will explore use of the BTCI technology in educational settings for children with special needs through programs such as Tools for Life, and will also conduct outreach efforts to expose K-12 students to facts about the CNS, its associated impairments, and different ways to address those problems with engineering solutions.