Filtering involuntary motion of people with tremor disability using optimal equalization

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel approach to tremor suppression using optimally designed digital equalizers derived from pursuit tracking tasks. Due to inherent properties of the man-machine system, the design of tremor suppression equalizers presents two serious problems: First, performance criteria leading to optimizations that minimize mean-squared error are not efficient for tremor elimination. Second, movement signals show highly ill-conditioned autocorrelation matrices, which often results in useless or unstable solutions. A new performance indicator as introduced, namely the F-MSE/sub d/, and the optimal equalizer according to this new criterion is developed. Ill-condition of the autocorrelation matrix is overcome using a novel method which we call pulled-optimization. Experiments performed with a tremor simulating device show significant results in tremor elimination.