Desenvolvimento de um protótipo para avaliação objetiva da força dos lábios humanos

Abstract

The human lips strength evaluation is a common procedure in the speech therapy clinic. This evaluation is usually done in a subjective way, which depends on the professionals clinic experience, as there is no objective way of measuring the lip strength. The importance of knowing this strength is due to the fact that disturbances in the lip structure causes modifications in the correct pattern of many functions, such as speech, chewing, swallowing and also in the correct dental alignment.The aim of this study was to develop a prototype to an objective lip strength measuring device capable to complement the subjective evaluation used by the speech therapists. To reach this goal, a measuring system was created which includes an intralips sensor connected to a cell type force transducer, which gives an analogical signal that is transmitted, processed and digitally stored. Twenty women, between 20 and 28 years of age, with proper lip tension in the subjective clinic evaluation, no history of disorders in stomathognasthic system structures and functions and no dental problem were evaluated.Three measures of 10 seconds each with a 2 minutes break between the measurements were done for each patient. The results showed a high variation coefficient in the analysis of the three test results for each patient. The variation was smaller when considering only the secondtest, which suggests the interference of the fact that the patient learned in the first measuring. The analysis between the patients also showed a large variation of the measuring results. The present study idescribes the development of a measuring system capable of performing lip strength evaluation in a quantitative way. There was a small variation of force values during the time of each measurement and no distinguished sharp points that could define apattern of configuration to the curve strength X time were observed The presented data was relevant to show the importance of developing quantitative methods to measure the patient evolution during the treatment and also to collaborate to the communication between the various professionals involved in the treatment process.