ABSTRACT
Oropharyngeal Dysphagia (OD) is a geriatric syndrome that prevents the elderly from swallowing food safely. Tongue muscle resistance training can effectively improve the swallowing function of the elderly, but it is difficult to quantify accurately. The flexible sensor placed at the hard palate can accurately collect tongue pressure during natural swallowing and tongue muscle resistance training. By collecting the key points and stress points of the hard palate during tongue muscle resistance training for the elderly, it is conducive to the accurate design of sensor placement points. However, there is little research on the hard palate size data of the elderly, and this study is designed to provide a reference for the intra-oral tongue pressure sensor. In this study, hard palate dental casts were collected from 110 elderly subjects (valid sample = 76) with an average age of 67.30 ± 9.78 years for males and 65.78 ± 7.74 years for females, and were examined with a camera, tripod and 5mm standard grid shot. Through literature collection and questionnaire analysis, the required palate point for sensor design was obtained. Then, the sampling results were processed by Digimier Version 5.4.4 software to extract the required palate point data, and the final data were analyzed with SPSS 27. Based on the results of this study, it is recommended that the 5th, 50th, and 95th percentiles of this statistical result be used as a size reference for the intra-oral tongue pressure sensor.
