Characteristics of Dry Chin-Tuck Swallowing Vibrations and Sounds

The effects of the chin-tuck maneuver, a technique commonly employed to compensate for dysphagia, on cervical auscultation are not fully understood. Characterizing a technique that is known to affect swallowing function is an important step on the way to developing a new instrumentation-based swallowing screening tool.

In this study, we recorded data from 55 adult participants who each completed five saliva swallows in a chin-tuck position. The resulting data were processed using previously designed filtering and segmentation algorithms. We then calculated nine time-, frequency-, and time-frequency-domain features for each independent signal.

We found that multiple frequency- and time-domain features varied significantly between male and female subjects as well as between swallowing sounds and vibrations. However, our analysis showed that participant age did not play a significant role on the values of the extracted features. Finally, we found that various frequency features corresponding to swallowing vibrations did demonstrate statistically significant variation between the neutral and chin-tuck positions but sounds showed no changes between these two positions.

The chin-tuck maneuver affects many facets of swallowing vibrations and sounds and its effects can be monitored via cervical auscultation.

These results suggest that a subject's swallowing technique does need to be accounted for when monitoring their performance with cervical auscultation-based instrumentation.