Tremor analysis by decomposition of acceleration into gravity and inertial acceleration using inertial measurement unit

Decomposition of acceleration was investigated as an alternative to commonly used direct spectral analysis of measured acceleration or angular velocity for tremor quantification. An orientation estimation algorithm was devised to decompose the measured acceleration into the gravitational artifact and the inertial acceleration caused by sensor movement in an inertial reference frame. Resulting signals, beside the measured acceleration and angular velocity, were used to assess tremor amplitude and frequency by spectral peak detection. The algorithm was tested on experimental data from a clinical study including patients with essential tremor. The testing comprised of the classification of measurements to come from a patient or a healthy control and of the regression of the visual assessment of tremor amplitude. Small improvements in performance measures were achieved by using the decomposed acceleration. The regression accuracy was comparable to the accuracy achieved in other works. The influence of sensor calibration and connections of results to an analytic approach were analyzed briefly.