Sensors 2011, 11 3021
with very disabling forms of tremor caused by movement disorders called as pathological tremors. They
are classified by position/motor behavior. Accordingly, pathological tremor can be classified into three
categories: rest, postural and kinetic tremor [2]. Physiological tremor has different aetiology compared
to pathological tremor and manifests differently in terms of amplitude and frequency [3–5].
The general assumption is that tremor has a single dominant frequency [3,5]. Pathological
tremor (patients with essential tremor and Parkinson disease) tend to display tremor with a dominant
frequency [5–8 ]. The frequency of the pathological tremor tends to remain constant with slight
variations [5]. The amplitude of the physiological tremor is much lower than the pathological tremor and
has different frequency bands. Recent results [9] for subjects with physiological tremor contradict the
general assumption and suggest that tremor parameters (like amplitude, frequency, bandwidth) largely
vary from subject to subject. In [9], it was shown that for physiological tremor has multiple dominant
frequencies with 3–4 Hz bandwidth.
Physiological hand tremor lies in the band of 8–12 Hz with an amplitude of 50 µm and can
be approximated by a sinusoidal movement [1,3]. Physiological tremor leads to an intolerable
imprecision of the surgical procedure (e.g., vitreoretinal surgery) which require a positioning accuracy
of about 10 µm [10]. To compensate physiological tremor, robotics assisted surgical procedures have
received significant attention [11–13]. In [11,12] a robotic handheld instrument to cancel physiological
tremor of surgeon in vitreoretinal microsurgery was implemented. The robotic instrument has to estimate
the tremor motion and generate an out-of-phase movement to cancel it in the real-time. The tip of the
micron will be unaffected by the tremor motion of the surgeon. MEMS accelerometers constitutes the
most common for tremor sensing in robotics assisted procedures [14,15].
Physiological tremor presents a technical challenge because of the high frequency band and its
application in real-time. The error compensation control loop has to be executed in real-time. The system
has to sense the tremor motion, distinguish between voluntary and undesired components, and generate
an out-of-phase movement of the effector (hardware or software) to nullify the erroneous part, all in one
sampling cycle. This approach will only work when there is a distinctive and accurate separation between
the desired and unwanted motion. For example, dominant frequency of physiological hand tremor lies
in the band of 6–15 Hz while hand movement of surgeon during microsurgery is almost always less
than 0.5–1 Hz. Due to presence of accelerometers in tremor sensing equipment, physiological
tremor filtering is more challenging with the presence of drift, noise and gravity in acceleration
measurements [14].
Although linear filters [16,17] are successful in compensating tremor, the inherent time delay [18]
is a major drawback where zero-phase filtering is required. In [19], it was shown that delay as small
as 30 ms may degrade performance in human-machine control applications. Effective tremor
compensation requires zero-phase lag in the filtering process so that the filtered tremor signal can be used
to generate an opposing motion to tremor in real-time. To overcome the problems with delays, adaptive
algorithms like Weighted-frequency Fourier linear combiner (WFLC) and Band limited multiple Fourier
linear combiner (BMFLC) are developed. Weighted-frequency Fourier linear combiner (WFLC) [20]
is an adaptive algorithm which models any quasi-periodic signal as a modulating sinusoid, and tracks
its frequency, amplitude and phase. WFLC incorporates frequency adaptation procedure into Fourier
Linear Combiner (FLC) [21]. Main drawback of WFLC lies in tracking signals with multiple dominant