Active force control system for hand tremor suppression by different actuators

Abstract

People with Parkinson's disease are the group of patients who have tremor on their hands; making a lot of difficulties in their daily life. This paper presents the performance of Active Force Control (AFC) system for suppressing human hand tremor in Parkinson's disease. This work endeavours to find the best combination of controllers and actuators in AFC systems to decay hand tremor. A human hand is modelled as a 4-Degree-of-Freedom biodynamic model and the mathematical equation for this model is derived. The model is excited by an external force to investigate the hand output using a control system. A comparison between three kinds of actuators for controlling the behaviour of the classic proportional-derivative controller to suppress the hand tremor is presented within the AFC control system. Results show that the AFC system with a piezoelectric actuator and a proportional-derivative (PD) controller is quite effective in suppressing the human hand tremor.