Quantification of physiological kinetic tremor and its correlation with aging

Abstract

Tremor is the most common movement disorder characterized by repetitive and stereotyped movements. The analysis of hand-drawing movements is commonly used in the evaluation of patients with tremor. The data collection conducted under kinetic conditions and while performing a voluntary movement highlights the kinetic tremor. Most investigations on tremor attempt to understand its relation to neuromuscular dysfunctions. Therefore, there is a lack of studies that aim to investigate the complex relation between the physiological tremor and aging, especially in kinetic conditions. In this context, the main motivation of this research was to generalize the results obtained in Almeida et al.[1], a study that quantified age-related changes in the kinetic tremor of clinically healthy individuals. For this, a number of features extracted from tremor activity, obtained from digitized drawings of Archimedes' spirals, were analyzed. The analyses followed the sequence: Linearization of the Archimedes' spiral; Estimate of tremor activity; Data pre-processing; Feature extraction from the tremor activity; and Application of Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) technique as described in Almeida et al. [1]. The generalization of the obtained results showed that the method based on LDA allows for a linear correlation between physiological kinetic tremor and aging. © 2012 IEEE.