Probabilistic Methods for Analyzing and Measuring Tremor in Humans

In this paper a system for analyzing human body movements with tremors is proposed. We developed a latent forces based method to evaluate quantitatively tremors, as they are important indicators for some diseases, such as Parkinson, Essential tremor and Strokes. Our contribution is a data driven method. It relies on a mechanistic model, from which latent mechanistic features are derived to explain human body movements in general and tremors in particular. To this end, we define two groups of forces: one group drives the normal body movements and the other one governs tremors. Moreover, in order to quantify tremors, we created an index based on distributions distances indicating the severity of symptoms. We applied this formalism to tremors in human body and tested it on a collection of realistic data.