Development and Validation of a Finger Tremor Simulator

Tremor, being one of the most severe symptoms of Parkinson's disease, has been considered as not only a medical problem but also an engineering problem. Increasingly, wearable technologies are being considered as a viable treatment option. In order to study and control tremor in the field of engineering, the first step often includes modeling and simulation, as access to patients is limited. With the successful realization of a finger tremor simulator, a wearable tremor suppression device could be validated prior to testing on humans. In this study, a tremor simulator was designed and validated with recorded patient tremor data. Two experimental assessments were conducted on the validation of tremor motion reproduction and tremor torque reproduction. The results showed that the proposed simulator has 9%, 82%, and 141% error in the reproduction of the power of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd harmonics of the tremor, and 11.89% mean error on motion reproduction. The tremor torque measured at the index finger metacarpophalangeal joint is 0.02pm 0.02 Nm, and the output torque from the tremor simulator is 0.03 pm 0.01 Nm. Further parameter adjustment of the control system is required to improve performance.