Motion Support for Tremor Suppression by Frequency Resolved Impedance Control

There are many patients with Parkinson's disease in Japan. The one of the initial symptom is tremor, which is involuntary oscillations of the body. Medications and deep brain stimulation are utilized as treatments for the tremor. However, side effects and the invasiveness to the brain are regarded as problems. Hence, the demand for the support equipment is increasing in order to suppress the tremor from outside the body. There are tremor suppression robots attached to hands and upper limbs. In other words, most researches focus on the tremor of arms. Therefore, this paper proposes the tremor suppression robot for a finger. Since the frequency of the tremor and the human intended movement are different from each other, the tremor suppression control is based on the frequency resolution. This proposed control achieves the following the human motions. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed by the simulation and experiment.