Department of Electronics, Universidad Nacional de San Luis, Argentina

Title of the Invited Talk: System for diagnosis and control of essential tremor disease based on reconfigurable logic

Abstract: Essential tremor (ET) is one of the most common movement disorders that is characterized by a postural and/or kinetic tremor, especially in the arms and hands, resulting from a periodic involuntary muscle contraction. A low-level tremor called physiological tremor is present in all people, but in its pathological form ET is characterized by high amplitude oscillations at different frequencies ranging between 4 and 12 Hz, which leads to visibly impaired motor activity, limiting the abilities to carry out daily activities, reaching some cases to cause embarrassing situations, reducing the quality of life of the people who suffer from it and even forcing them to stop belonging to the productive-labor system. The proposed solution consists of developing a portable, low-cost, non-invasive, low-consumption, easy-to-use system based on FPGA, for the diagnosis, monitoring, and suppression of essential tremor, based on a multichannel electromyographic system for the detection of electromyographic signals, a signal
processing and data capture stage for tremor analysis and prediction, and a stimulation stage to counteract tremor, delivering electrical stimulation to the corresponding antagonistic muscles during involuntary activation of the agonist muscle and vice versa, using functional electrical stimulation (FES).