A Wearable Inertial Sensing Technology for Clinical Assessment of Tremor

TEMPO (Technology-Enabled Medical Precision Observation) 1.0 is a novel, first-generation, wearable data collection and analysis platform for assessment of a variety of human movement disorders, including tremor. It enables quantitative, objective, and continuous measurement of movement with minimal invasiveness and inconvenience to the patient and clinician, respectively. This system meets requirements for wearability, data storage, sampling rate, number of sensors, interface methods, and form factor, which are necessary for applications on person. In addition to the design and development of a basic data acquisition device, various circuits and systems were engineered to interface wearable, triaxial MEMS inertial sensors. Furthermore, custom data analysis software that processes datasets collected from the device and sensors, was created, and has demonstrated clinical utility in the analysis of tremor. Data processing techniques include a unique filtering scheme and a novel application of cross-correlation. The analysis was conducted pre- and post-operatively, in conjunction with the University of Virginia's Department of Neurosurgery, for a study of deep brain stimulation efficacy. This paper presents the engineering of and experimental results obtained with TEMPO 1.0 technology in the clinical assessment of tremor.