500 Section - Postural Assistance Using a Visual Feedback System in Individuals with Dysphagia: A Pilot Study

Dysphagia, or difficulty in swallowing, is a serious health issue affecting patients’ mortality and QOL. During swallowing, posture plays an important role in safe swallowing; however, maintaining the specific posture is challenging for patients.

We have developed a real-time visual feedback system to assist patient in adjusting their neck angles during swallowing and this study investigates the effectiveness of this feedback system.

Design:

We conducted a pilot study with two hospitalized male patients, aged 87 (P1) and 74 (P2), who were diagnosed with dysphagia. Each participant wore a neckband which simultaneously measured swallowing sounds and neck angles. Real-time visual feedback was displayed on a smartphone and patients were instructed to adjust their neck angles by the visual cues while swallowing. Date on swallowing durations, neck angles, and video recordings were saved to the cloud. L2CS-Net (Abdelrahman et al. 2023) was performed to analyze whether patients attended to the smartphone display.

Results: Recorded time frames of each patient is 21.67 minutes for P1 and 8.92 minutes for P2. P1 swallowed 39 times with an average swallowing time of 0.90 ± 0.25 seconds (min: 0.48, max: 1.80) and P2 swallowed 13 times with an average of 0.48 ± 0.13 seconds (min: 0.22, max: 0.74). Given a tolerance range of ±5 degrees from their proposed neck angles, the average pitch angles were -28.81 ± 3.75°for P1 and -33 ± 10.57 for P2. Regarding the gaze analysis showed variations in attention to the smartphone between two patients.

Conclusion:

Despite having mild dementia, both patients were able to adjust their neck posture independently while swallowing. The findings suggested that real-time visual feedback may: 1) support self-adjustment of neck angles during swallowing, and 2)reduce reliance on caregivers for posture correction.