Mastication (chewing) is important not only for food intake, but also for preserving and promoting the general health. Recent studies have showed that mastication helps to maintain cognitive functions in the hippocampus, a central nervous system region vital for spatial memory and learning. The purpose of this paper is to review the recent progress of the association between mastication and the...

BACKGROUND The rehabilitation of complications related to oral feeding, resulting from gastroplasty is the competence of the speech therapist, to intervene in mastication and swallowing functions, aiming at quality of life. AIM Check in the postoperative period the efficiency of stimulation, independent judges in readiness for re-introduction of solid food in morbidly obese undergoing gastrop...

Purpose To describe and compare the temporal-spatial kinematic variables of mandibular movement during deliberate unilateral and habitual mastication in healthy young-adult individuals. Methods The study sample was composed of eight male healthy volunteers aged 19 to 24 years. The kinematic data were obtained using a motion analysis system - Qualisys Track Manager (QTM) ProReflex MCU. Recordi...

The age-related decline in motor function is associated with changes in intrinsic brain signatures. Here, we investigated the functional connectivity (FC) associated with masticatory performance, a clinical index evaluating general masticatory function. Twenty-six older adults (OA) and 26 younger (YA) healthy adults were recruited and assessed using the masticatory performance index (MPI) and r...

Although mastication is primarily involved in food intake and digestion, it also promotes and preserves general health, including cognitive function. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission topography studies recently revealed that mastication leads to increases in cortical blood flow and activates the somatosensory, supplementary motor, and insular cortices, as well ...

Lipomas are relatively uncommon benign tumor occurring in the oral cavity with a prevalence rate of 1% to 4% of all oral lesions. They present as a slow growing, painless, asymptomatic submucosal mass and surgical excision is the treatment of choice. Oral lipomas have been known to grow to large sizes causing interference with speech, mastication and construction of denture. A case of 77 years ...

The difficulty in masticating and swallowing rice cake was quantified. Healthy subjects ate pieces of rice cake (9 g and 3 g) and a modified product (9 g). We used electromyography to measure the activity of the jaw-closing and -opening muscles during chewing, as well as the suprahyoid muscle activity, laryngeal movement, and sound during swallowing. The smaller the rice cake, the shorter the m...

This paper presents a robotic sensing system that evaluates the texture of gel-like food, in which not only mechanical characteristics, but also geometrical characteristics of the texture are objectively and quantitatively evaluated. When a human chews a gel-like food, the person perceives the changes in the shape and contact force simultaneously on the tongue. Based on their impression, they e...

mobile robot navigation is one of the basic problems in robotics. in this paper, a new approachis proposed for autonomous mobile robot navigation in an unknown environment. the proposedapproach is based on learning virtual parallel paths that propel the mobile robot toward the trackusing a multi-layer, feed-forward neural network. for training, a human operator navigates themobile robot in some...