Development of the Integrated Non-Invasive Swallowing Function Assessment and Clinical Applications for Subacute Stroke Patients

When the food is hard to be swallowed from the mouth, through the throat, to the stomach, we call this symptom dysphagia. Dysphagia will lead to many complications, such as dehydration, malnutrition, choking injuries, aspiration pneumonia and even death. To avoid dysphagia and other complications, early swallowing function assessment is very important. A normal swallowing process can be separated into the oral stage, the pharyngeal stage, and the esophageal stage. Conventional assessment methods include the simple swallowing tests and instrumental tests; the former tests could not have detailed and objective evaluation, while the latter tests usually involve invasive testing. Moreover, most of these methods will have time and space limitation or radiation exposure risk if the tests are performed frequently at the bedside. Since 2014, we have been founded a two-year MOST project, in which we collaborated with the research team of the Chang Gung Memorial Hospital to develop a portable, non-invasive device for the pharyngealstage assessment. In 2016, we further developed a non-invasive tongue pressure measurement device to evaluate the swallowing function at the oral stage. Following up these researches, in this project, we will propose an integrated swallowing function assessment platform to integrate these works. This platform will connect the measurement of the tongue pressure and the thyroid cartilage motion with the respiration and the submental muscle strength monitoring to provide a complete swallowing assessment report from the oral stage to the pharyngeal stage. Meanwhile, we will build a database and develop an intelligent analyzer to perform the analysis for swallowing function statistics. Equally importantly, we will use this platform to develop two clinical assessments for subacute stroke inpatients, including the cough monitoring and spontaneous swallowing monitoring.

Project ID:PB10607-1401
External Project ID:MOST106-2221-E182-028