Wearable and non-invasive assistive technologies

In this chapter, we have reviewed the state-of-the-art wearable assistive technologies (AT) for people with severe physical disabilities. ATs play an important role in the lives of these individuals by allowing them to be more independent. More specifically, we have described the concept, architecture, and evaluation of a tongue-operated wireless and wearable AT, known as the Tongue Drive System (TDS), which can infer user's intentions by detecting their volitional tongue movements using an array of magnetic sensors and a small magnetic tracer secured near the tip of the tongue. We have also presented the latest multimodal version of the TDS (mTDS), which incorporates tongue commands, head tracking, and speech recognition into a lightweight wearable headset, to provide its end user with a more effective, intuitive, and reliable computer access tool that can be used in a wide variety of daily living tasks. Clinical trials by individuals with high-level spinal cord injuries (SCIs) have demonstrated that TDS can effectively substitute some of the hands and fingers functions in controlling computer mouse cursor and driving powered wheelchairs with comparable or exceeding performance to some of the existing devices in the market.