If you thought keeping track of your eating or drinking habits with an ordinary pen and paper was sufficient, take a look at the new wearable sensors that can be placed on your teeth to track all of your oral habits.
The human mouth is constantly used and it performs some of our most important daily functions. It is also an important tool in evaluating a person’s health.
The wearable oral sensory system developed and tested by researchers at the National Taiwan University in China can recognize a human’s oral activities such as chewing, drinking, speaking, coughing, and smoking.
The smart tooth is made of a sensor and accelerometer that can track your oral behaviors. (Image via Hao-hua Chu, National Taiwan University)
The sensory system is made of a small accelerometer sensor embedded inside of an artificial tooth that is placed in the user’s mouth and can recognize movement in all three dimensions.
Why detect our oral habits?
Detecting our oral habits in this way can enable healthcare applications such as food and fluid intake monitoring.
Although this isn’t the first kind of technology developed to detect oral habits, it is different from others since it can be placed directly at the source, inside the mouth. Some other methods involve an earphone and a microphone. The earphone records chewing sounds and discerns between different food types. The microphone can be worn around the neck to recognize different swallowing actions.
The National Taiwan University team is working on future prototypes of the sensing technology that include small Bluetooth radios wirelessly transmitting the sensor data to a nearby mobile device.
In the future, the team would also like to advance the device’s capabilities by incorporating a small energy harvester to power the artificial tooth for up to a day. This way, it wouldn’t have to be taken out your mouth to recharge.
The team presented its work last week at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers in Switzerland.
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