Quantification of body tremor

A low-cost spectral analysis system for the measurement and analysis of body tremor is described. The system has been implemented using an accelerometer, amplifier and microcomputer complete with a special-purpose data acquisition interface and appropriate software. Data are acquired in eight 8-s epochs at a sampling rate of 128 Hz for resting, modified postural, and postural arm positions and stored for offline analysis. The time information is transformed to the frequency domain using the fast Fourier transform, and the average power spectrum in bands 1-32 Hz is computed for the 64-s recording period. Hardware and software aspects of the system are discussed and the results are briefly summarized.<
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