Current progress on pathological tremor modelling and active compensation using functional electrical stimulation

Pathological tremor is an involuntary and roughly periodic movement of a body part. It is the most common movement disorder and its incidence increases with aging. Upper limb tremor can cause difficulties in performing simple activities of daily living like buttoning, inserting a key into a keyhole and writing. The proposed active tremor compensation method involves 3 stages: sensing, filtering and actuation. Tremor and intended motion are observed by means of motion and neuromuscular sensors and a filtering algorithm is applied to separate such movements. Then, the antagonist of the trembling muscle is actuated in anti-phase with respect to the tremor signal using Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES). The project long term goal is to provide a wearable tremor suppression orthosis for the upper limb. This paper reports the current progress in each portion of the project.

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