Research

Multimodal Tongue Drive System (mTDS)

June 2014 to present

Assistive technologies play a critical role in the lives of people with severe disabilities and help them to lead independent self-supportive lives. Persons severely disabled as a result of causes ranging from traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries to stroke and cerebral palsy generally find it extremely difficult to carry out everyday tasks without continuous help. Assistive technologies that help them communicate their intentions and effectively control their environment, especially to operate a computer, can greatly improve the quality of life for this group of people and may even help them to be employed.

mTDS is one of the assistive technology that helps severely paralyzed (quadriplegic) people to improve their daily life like driving the wheelchair, interacting with the environment (turning off or on light, air condition etc), operating a computer or phone using their combined speech, tongue, and head motion simultaneously or sequentially.

My job includes developing hardware from scratch, firmware, signal processing, running the human trial to evaluate the system performance and statistical analysis of those data. Some of my designs are shown in the following figure:

This figure is showing a complete multimodal tongue drive system (mTDS). This system has the capabilities to use tongue commands to do mouse clicks, speech recognition to speech type and head tracking to navigate the mouse cursor. It can help quadriplegic people to do their daily computer task as well as drive a wheelchair using their tongue. A demo video link is given below:

Media and News:

09/01/2018   https://mobilitymgmt.com/Articles/2018/09/01/Tongue-Drive-System.aspx?Page=1

11/01/2017     https://www.ece.gatech.edu/news/598197/gt-bionics-lab-selected-acrm-conference-honors

08/01/2017    http://blog.snapeda.com/2017/08/01/engineer-spotlight-nazmus-sahadat-from-georgia-institute-of-technology