Electromagnetic articulography with AG500 and AG501

The AG500 (Carstens Medizinelektronik GmbH) is widely used in electromagnetic articulography, as it allows the recording in 3D of the movements of the articulatory organs. However some anomalies in sensor position tracking were recognized and analyzed in previous works, which ultimately attributed them to numerical issues and not to external interferences. Recently a new upgraded model, the AG501, has been introduced. By means of both speech experiments and numerical measurements, we analyzed the reliability of the AG501 and compared it to that of the previous model, the AG500. While, in some scenarios, the positions obtained via the AG500 are afflicted by external perturbations, the AG501 showed a greater degree of precision in all the numerical experiments, and in the speech analyses that have been performed so far.