Electromyography of diurnal bruxism during assessment and treatment

Ellement et al. (2021) hooked three adults with intellectual disability to a small EMG patch on the cheek.

The patch records tiny jaw-muscle bursts that happen during silent teeth grinding.

Staff were taught to spot these bursts on a tablet and to log them during a regular functional analysis.

Silent bruxism showed clear patterns: more grinding when the client was alone than when staff played games.

After a short 20-minute training, staff agreed with the EMG signal 96 % of the time.

The whole setup cost under $200 and took 15 minutes to place each morning.

Gilchrist et al. (2018) and Lotfizadeh et al. (2020) used wrist accelerometers to catch hand-flapping and self-hits.

All three studies swap human timers for cheap body sensors and hit over 90 % accuracy, so the idea travels across topographies.

La Valle et al. (2024) looked at another low-profile response—mini speech bursts in minimally verbal kids.

Their mic-based coder and the EMG patch both prove you can now track events you used to miss, giving you earlier, cleaner data for your FA.

If you run FAs on non-vocal clients, add an EMG patch to the masseter for one week. You will see when bruxism really happens, stop guessing from tooth wear, and walk into the treatment meeting with hard numbers instead of "sometimes." The authors share the exact training deck—use it.