Towards a sensing system for quantification of pathological tremor

In this paper, a sensing system is proposed to quantify pathological tremor in human upper limb. Tremor is the most common movement disorder, defined as the involuntary rhythmic or semi rhythmic body part oscillation resulting from simultaneous alternating antagonistic muscle group contractions. Patients with tremor face difficulty doing simple things like inserting a key to a keyhole, social embarrassment and heavy economical cost. Current diagnosis is based on subjective clinical assessment and difficult to capture subtle tremor features. We will use surface electromyography (sEMG) as our main sensor as sEMG gives 20-100 ms lead time before the actual motion. Accelerometer information is then used as a corrector to the sEMG information. Finally, at the initial phase of this project, an optical tracking system will be used as ground truth.