BARTON: Low power tongue movement sensing with in-ear barometers

• Main Authors: MAAG, Balz, ZHOU, Zimu, SAUKH, Olga, THIELE, Lothar
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: Human computer interaction; Ubiquitous computing; Pressure sensors; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4829
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Sensing tongue movements enables various applications in hands-free interaction and alternative communication. We propose BARTON, a BARometer based low-power and robust TONgue movement sensing system. Using a low sampling rate of below 50 Hz, and only extracting simple temporal features from in-ear pressure signals, we demonstrate that it is plausible to distinguish important tongue gestures (left, right, forward) at low power consumption. We prototype BARTON with commodity earpieces integrated with COTS barometers for in-ear pressure sensing and an ARM micro-controller for signal processing. Evaluations show that BARTON yields 94% classification accuracy and 8.4 mW power consumption, which achieves comparable accuracy, but consumes 44 times lower energy than the stateof-the-art microphone-based solutions. BARTON is also robust to head movements and operates with music played directly from earphones.