A 3D printed electronic wearable device to generate vertical, horizontal and phono-articulatory jaw movement parameters: A concept implementation

Purpose: The current research aimed to develop a concept open-source 3D printable, electronic wearable head gear to record jaw movement parameters. 

Materials & methods: A 3D printed wearable device was designed and manufactured then fitted with open-source sensors to record vertical, horizontal and phono-articulatory jaw motions. Mean deviation and relative error were measured invitro. The device was implemented on two volunteers for the parameters of maximum anterior protrusion (MAP), maximum lateral excursion (MLE), normal (NMO), and maximum (MMO) mouth opening and fricative phono-articulation. Raw data was normalized using z-score and root mean squared error (RMSE) values were used to evaluate relative differences in readings across the two participants. 

Results: RMSE differences across the left and right piezoresistive sensors demonstrated near similar bilateral movements during normal (0.12) and maximal mouth (0.09) opening for participant 1, while varying greatly for participant 2 (0.25 and 0.14, respectively). There were larger differences in RMSE during accelerometric motion in different axes for MAP, MLE and Fricatives. 

Conclusion: The current implementation demonstrated that a 3D printed electronic wearable device with open-source sensor technology can record horizontal, vertical, and phono-articulatory max-illomandibular movements in two participants. However, future efforts must be made to overcome the limitations documented within the current experiment.