Extraction of Sources of Tremor in Hand Movements of Patients with Movement Disorders

This paper proposes an efficient method to acquire sources of tremor in patients with movement disorders based on blind source separation of convolutive mixtures. The extracted sources indicated neural activities that might be generated in the central nervous system. Four patients with essential tremor were tested in a set of movement tasks. Subjects wore a data glove that measured finger movements of the hand. The experimental data were then fed to a convolutive-mixture model, which revealed sources that imbibed in them the tremor frequency components of 2--8 Hz. Time--frequency analysis of these sources might be of potential help to clinicians to devise tasks that can manifest visible tremor from patients.