Electronic device to help the diagnosis of Parkinsonian and Essential Tremor

This work describes the methods applied and the obtained results with a developed electronic device capable to measure human tremor. It uses accelerometers as sensors, which does the measurements in two dimensions. A software was developed to be used as the system interface and stores the measured tremor time series using a portable microcomputer. The system was statically and dynamically calibrated to ensure that its measurements are effective. The tremors frequency is calculated using the FFT algorithm. The system was submitted to the ethics committee of the University Hospital (HC-UFPR) in Curitiba-PR, Brazil, and it was tested in 17 volunteers with Essential Tremor and 62 volunteers with Parkinsonian Tremor. The results obtained have shown that it is statistically possible to differentiate the frequencies of both tremor types.