A compact hand-held active physiological tremor compensation instrument

This paper presents research, design, and development of a compact version of a hand-held active physiological tremor compensation instrument called ldquoITremrdquo. The instrument comprises three main portions: sensing, filtering, and manipulation. Accelerometers are employed to sense three degrees-of-freedom motion of the instrument tool tip. Minimal-phase filtering is performed to extract tremulous motion of the tip from its total motion. As for manipulation, piezoelectric actuators and flexure based mechanism are employed to move the tool tip to an opposite direction but an equal in magnitude of the tremulous motion. The performance of the instrument was evaluated using a micro motion sensing system (M
²
S
²
). The preliminary results of bench tests as well as hand-held tests are shown.