Published on January 31, 2005

People who face difficulties swallowing food and drink can soon expect relief from their suffering with the development of a new device that assists swallowing.

Those who have undergone cervical surgery, or who face any other neck of the swallowing system, called dysphagia, will be able to swallow much easier.

As patients with dysphagia are vulnerable to malnutrition, it’s difficult for doctors to treat their overall condition.

Realising this, a research team at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Prince of Songkhla University has focussed on assisting this group of patients with their difficulties.

The team, headed by institute director Vitoon Leelamanit, studied the nature of swallowing, and spent six years on research and development to produce a device to help patients.

The invention uses electrical signals to stimulate throat muscles, opening the throat to ease the passage of food, said Vitoon.

Dysphagia sufferers often have difficulty moving their throat muscles and using the tongue to lift the vocal chords to open the food passage.

With the new development, said Vitoon, the swallowing process is made easier.

To make the process effective, he said the team had to identify the signal from the brain that controls the swallowing process, then replicate the brain signal with an electronic device to stimulate the muscle used for swallowing.

Vitoon said his team studied the swallowing process in depth, and conducted many trail-and-error experiments before they were successful in developing the device.

“We found that the time taken for the brain to send a signal to the muscles in the throat to swallow took a fraction of a second, so we had to design a processing system to calculate the signal and give a result very fast,” he said.

Earlier versions of the system could provide a result within a few seconds, but this proved too slow for effective swallowing.

“So, we had to redesign the system. It took us an additional year to solve the problem and finally develop a system that could process the signal and give results in only 60 milliseconds,” he said.

The system, contained within a cube-shaped box, divides the process into two parts. The first part is to process the signal and make a decision to send an electrical signal to the relevant muscles. The second part of the process is to generate the required electrical signal.

The device has two sets of electrical connections. The first set must be attached to saliva glands to receive the swallowing signal sent from the brain and relay it to the central system for processing. The second set, placed around the neck of the patient, carries the electrical signal generated by the central system to stimulate the muscle.

So far, 40 patients at Songkhla Hospital have used the device, and the team is now working with a private manufacturer of medical equipment to produce the device commercially. It is expected to be launched on the market this year. The technology behind the new product has already been patented in Thailand and the United States.

Pongpen Sutharoj

The Nation

pongpen@nationgroup.com

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