Adaptive filters for the suppression of tremor

Intention tremor severely compromises everyday life tasks in patients suffering with multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's disease. The paper reports the current achievements in the analysis of subjects' movements. The trajectories produced by patients affected by tremor are investigated. Indexing procedures for the evaluation of the tremor which is present in the trajectories are proposed. Such indexes should be sensitive to tremor while they are not to ordinary movements. The properties of the indexes have been verified both with analytical considerations and with numerical tests. An experimental setup has been realized for the analysis of tremor on patients affected by multiple sclerosis tremor. The data collected within this experiment have been compared with expected results. Furthermore the indexing procedure has been applied for the evaluation of a filtering system. The case of handwriting has been chosen as the reference task for the evaluation of achieved results. The results of clinical tests are presented. Finally the applicability of the index-based procedures to the control of filtering systems is discussed. The control architectures in the case of force-feedback less interfaces as well as haptic interfaces are presented and discussed