Development of an automatic cervical auscultation system for the diagnosis of dysphagia in children with neurodevelopmental problems in the city of Cuenca. 2015

In relation to the sociocultural development of the population, the disorders of the development and behavior of the child and adolescent have taken higher prevalence in the pediatric consultation. When a child presents neurodevelopment problems it is pertinent to have tools that allow diagnosing and/or treating pathologies associated with these problems to collaborate with the management of these development disorders; Such is the case of dysphagia. Generally, dysphagia has been diagnosed by videofluoroscopic and videondoscopic studies, however, these are highly invasive. For its part, cervical auscultation (AC) is a non -invasive measurement tool to assess the aspiration, penetration and pharynx retention and has been widely used in clinical environments including medical and nursing facilities, so it is presented as a cheaper and more viable solution for the diagnosis of dysphagia in children with neurodevelopment problems. This project consists in the development of a pilot system of cervical auscultation for the diagnosis of dysphagia in children with neuro-development problems. To this end, it is necessary to make the design of the pilot biomedical application as such, from the instrumentation (hardware) necessary for its implementation (stages of capture, measurement, development of the data acquisition system and its interface with a computer (PC or laptop)), to the design and development of computer programs (software) for sampling, processing of the signals, and the visualization of the data obtained by the data Hardware, as well as the friendly man-machine interface for the end user (treating doctor). Finally, the evaluation of the developed system and its validation is proposed through equivalent techniques. Although in the literature there are developments of this type, they generally consider only a particular signal, without greater processing of it, needing highly specialized personnel for the appropriate interpretation of the results; This is why the application of new signal processing techniques that allow their classification as a support for the diagnosis of dysphagia is proposed.

PROMETEO PROGRAM - UNIVERSITY OF CUENCA