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Background: This study presents a custom, wearable headset designed for recording acoustic emissions (AEs) of temporomandibular joints (TMJs) and assesses the repeatability and reliability of this headset on children.

Methods: This study, performed in a clinical setting, began with two 13-year-old, males: one with TMJ sounds and one without for proof-of-concept TMJ AE recordings. To test the repeatability of these measurements, nine healthy children (6 females) between 6–18 years old (10.7±3.7 years), with no history of craniofacial disorders or jaw disease were recruited. Each child had AEs recorded for three sessions of 10 repetitions of mouth opening and closing. The repeatability of these recordings was quantified using the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC).

Results: The two proof of concept recordings showed several qualitative differences in the signal including an increased number of spikes in the signal from the child with TMJ sounds. In the repeatability testing, the ICC was computed across all features for all TMJs. The ICC values of the signal features were 0.963 for the root mean square (RMS) amplitude, 0.912 for energy, and 0.995 for the zero-crossing-rate.

Conclusions: The results of this study suggest that the headset can reliably capture AEs associated with TMJ articulation.