Hand Tremor Suppuration by Muscle Surface Electrical Stimulation

Tremor is one of the most frequent movement disorders which is involuntary and approximately sinusoidal. It affects various body joints such as elbow. Tremor on an elbow is considered as extension, flection, and rotation of the forearm. There are miscellaneous types of treatments for tremor one of which is electrical stimulation. In this research, we study existing stimulation methods in order to reduce tremor and control stimulation pulses. It should be notified that studying these methods requires 1- an electrical stimulator so that one can run natural experiments and estimate the validity of the model, 2- a skeletal- neuromuscular model in order to study the tremor dynamics and the system simulation, and 3- determining an appropriate stimulation scheme and control method in order that one can control the stimulation parameters to reduce tremor. The antagonist muscle stimulation technique for reducing tremor is in the form of either muscle co-contraction or anti-phase stimulation. In the former method, considering the fact that the time-dependent system has time-delay, disturbance, and non-linearities, a robust controller is needed. Hence, in this study, we take advantage of MPC controller because of its features. The results show that MPC controller is more satisfactory than the PID and fuzzy ones used in previous works and also demonstrate that one can theoretically reduce tremor by applying appropriate electrical stimulation.