ECE Departmental Seminar

Tooth Brushing Monitoring Using Wrist Watch

Prof. Shan Lin

Wednesday,11/30/16, 2:30pm
Light Engineering 250

Summary:  Dental caries and gum diseases are among the most prevalent chronic diseases in both children and adults. Most of these dental diseases are the results of bacteria deposited on the surface of the teeth. Without proper brushing, such bacteria accumulate on the tooth surfaces in a complex called plaque, destroying the outermost layer of the tooth (enamel) and initiating gingival inflammation, resulting in dental decay and gum diseases. Proper toothbrushing is crucial to plaque reduction and dental pathology prevention. However, there is very limited technology to monitor the effectiveness of toothbrushing at home. In this work, a system is built to monitor the brushing quality on all 16 tooth surfaces using a manual toothbrush and an off-the-shelf wrist watch. The toothbrush is modified by attaching small magnets to the handle, so that its orientation and motion can be captured by the magnetic sensor in the wrist watch. The toothbrushing gestures are recognized based on inertial sensing data from the wrist watch. In extensive experiments with 12 users over 3 weeks, our system successfully recognized toothbrushing gestures with an average precision of 85.6%.

Bio: Shan Lin is an assistant professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Stony Brook University. He received his PhD in computer science at the University of Virginia. His research is in the area of networked systems, with an emphasis on feedback control based design in cyber physical systems. He works on wireless network protocols, medical devices, smart buildings, and smart transportation systems. He recently received the NSF Career award.