Development of a tool for monitoring the jaw-opening pace and preliminary comparison the pace between young and old ages

Background: Studies have demonstrated that high-speed jaw-opening exercises are effective in improving swallowing function. However, there has been no objective tool available for monitoring jaw-opening pace. This study aimed to develop an objective tool for monitoring and validating jaw-opening pace and compare it between young and old ages from different age groups.

Materials and methods: A load cell plug-in jaw pad connected to an automatic recording and analysis system was used to record jaw-opening motions for offline analysis. We recruited 58 healthy volunteers from different age groups (20-39 y/o; 40-59y/o; 60-79y/o). During a 2-min recording session, each participant was instructed to fully open and close their jaw as quickly as possible while wearing a sensor. Bland-Altman plot, paired t-test and Pearson's correlation test were used to compare the number of jaw-opening motions between manual counting and automatic software analysis. The number of jaw-opening motions during the 2-min recording was compared between the three age groups.

Results: Automated analysis of jaw-opening pace was efficient and equally comparable with the traditional manual counting method across the three age groups. A declining trend in jaw-opening pace among the old age group was found but with no statistically significant difference.

Conclusion: A jaw-opening motion monitoring tool with reliable automatic pace analysis software was validated in young and old ages The jaw-opening pace demonstrated a tendency to decline with age.