Tremor acquisition and reduction for robotic surgical applications

Tremor is the major cause for human imprecision during microsurgery. It corrupts accurate voluntary motion causing an unwanted disturbance or noise. Even though there have been many developments made for tremor measurements, still the challenges remain to make these measurements robust and accurate in real-time working environment. Hence, need is to design a system and to develop an algorithm that can track and nullify these tremors while still responding to the movements/commands of the surgeon's hands. In the research work interest lies in the area of signal acquisition which includes design of the device to acquire the hand motion, differentiate between the voluntary motion and the motion incurred due to physiological tremor. Signal processing is done with focus on filtering of tremor signal for tremor compensation in robotic surgical applications. The present work deals with the issues to measure the hand tremor at the surgeon handle and to reduce at the far end at tool tip.