Abstract:
Tremors are the involuntary oscillations of a body
part which occur due to diseases such as Parkinson’s Disease
(PD), Essential tremor (ET) or stroke, which disturbs the
activities of daily living (ADL). This paper presents an evaluation
of hand tremor frequency among patients in Sri Lanka using a
soft glove embedded with inertial measuring units (IMU) and
its development and validation. This is a research towards the
development of a hand tremor suppression device which requires
data on hand tremors. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no
local data is available on hand tremors despite the availability
of global studies. The hand tremor was quantitatively analyzed
and the dominant frequency for each patient, overall mean and
standard deviation of peak frequencies were obtained for this
study group. The results show a mean of 5.05 ± 2.03 Hz for peak
frequencies for the hand tremor patient sample in Sri Lanka. By
the gender 4.62 ± 1.78 Hz and 5.69 Hz ± 2.38 Hz are the mean
of peak frequencies for male and female sample respectively.
This research will also be useful in disease diagnosing in clinical
studies and developing hand tremor assessment tools.
