Development of wearable inertial sensors for measurement of hand arm tremors

Abstract

This paper presents the development wearable inertial sensors in hand arm tremor measurement. Three inertial measurement units, each with a triaxial accelerometer and a triaxial gyroscope were strapped on hand, lower arm and upper arm respectively for tremor data acquisition. The measurement device was selected based on the specifications of the commonly found tremors, namely physiological tremor, parkinsonian tremor and essential tremor. The data acquisition and postprocessing of the tremor data were done in Labview environment. The acquired linear and angular data were used to compute the tremor quantification parameters. The tremor quantification parameters developed in this work were Teager energy and tremor motion in pronation-supination, flexion-extension and abduction-adduction. The proposed tremor quantification parameters and wearable inertial sensors have the potential to be used in diagnosis of tremors. One of the challenges faced in this work was to obtain accurate data postprocessing from all sensors which transfer data in serial. Further research is needed in exploring the potentials of the measurement system to be applied clinically and in modeling.