An Application for the Analysis of Human Tremor Time-Series
For many diseases various methods for the diagnosis and treatment monitoring are available. Presently, such methods are not established for an investigation of human tremor diseases, although the different forms of tremor are common neurological symptoms
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Center for Data-Analysis and Modeling and Department of Physics, University of Freiburg, Eckerstr. 1, 79104 Freiburg, Germany Center for Neuroscience, University of Freiburg, Breisacherstr. 64, 79106 Freiburg, Germany Department of Neurology, University of Kiel, Niemannsweg 147, Kiel, Germany
Abstract. For many diseases various methods for the diagnosis and treatment monitoring are available. Presently, such methods are not established for an investigation of human tremor diseases, although the different forms of tremor are common neurological symptoms and occur frequently in various neurological diseases and also other conditions. Human tremor is defined as an involuntary oscillation of one or more parts of the body. The goal of this project was to develop new methods and to improve and automate already proposed methods for the diagnosis and treatment monitoring of human tremors. We built an easy-to-use application for tremor-analysis and recording, running on conventional personal computers, that allows to investigate different forms of human tremor by advanced mathematical methods of time series analysis. The software is also applicable for users who are not familiar with these kind of advanced data analysis methods. It provides tools for the diagnosis and treatment monitoring under laboratory conditions, mainly based on the cross-spectral and spectral analysis of tremor acceleration time-series and electromyographic time-series. The software is now available on the market.
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Introduction
Since many decades the electrophysiological and mathematical analysis of human tremor was subject to numerous studies. Tremor is defined as the involuntary, oscillatory movement of parts of the body, mainly the upper limbs. There are many different kinds of tremor, differentiated by clinical criterions. The better understanding of the generating mechanisms of the different human tremors could lead to an improvement of diagnosis and therapy of tremor diseases. Although the most common types of tremor, physiological tremor, enhanced physiological tremor, essential tremor and Parkinsonian Tremor, were investigated in many clinical and physiological studies, their mechanisms and origins are still unknown, for reviews see, e.g., [1-3]. Many other (sometimes very rare) tremors exist [1,3]. Shortly, the physiological tremor (PT) denotes a fine, low-amplitude oscillatory movement of the outstretched hand and is present more or less intense in all humans. Its origin is still under discussion. It was supposed to W. Jäger et al. (eds.), Mathematics - Key Technology for the Future © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003
Analysis of Tremor Time-Series
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originate from reflex loops [4-6], by random synchronization [7] or from a central oscillator [8-10]. The frequency of PT usually ranges from 7 Hz up to 11 Hz and depends on the weight of the hand, Le. its frequency decreases if the outstretched hand is loaded with weights [3]. The so called enhanced physiological tremor (EPT) denotes a tremor whose frequency also depends on th
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