Tremor suppression with an upper-limb power-assist exoskeleton robot

Abstract

Many persons suffer from tremor in daily activities. Tremor suppression devises are expected to improve the quality of life for such persons. On the other hand, power-assist exoskeletons have been developed for many purposes up to the present. Some of them can be used to suppress the tremor motion. In this paper, an on-line tremor suppression method is proposed for the suppression of the essential tremor. In the proposed method, the tremor motion (involuntary motion) and the intended motion (voluntary motion) are separated by filters. Then, an artificial neural network which consists of sinusoidal activity functions is applied. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated by performing the experiments.