Fig. 1

Overview of the tongue-based robotic control system. a The inductive tongue interface incorporating 10 sensors in the keypad and 8 sensors in the mousepad. The sensors are activated using a glued or pierced metal activation unit shown at the bottom. b The central unit which wirelessly receives the signal from the tongue interface and transforms these into characters. c The computer which wirelessly receives the characters from the central unit and transforms these into commands. The commands are passed on to the assistive robotic arm through the USB port. d The computer screen showing the visual feedback to the experimental participant (left), the mapping of the sensors to the movement of the robot (middle) and the robot software (right)