Tremor is the most common movement disorder and is
strongly increasing in incidence and prevalence with ageing. The most
frequent types of tremor are those arising from two neurodegenerative
disorders: Parkinson’s disease (PD) and essential tremor (ET). Although not life
threatening, upper limb tremors hamper independent life of 65% of those
suffering from them, greatly impacting on their quality of life. Tremor
is not effectively managed in 25% of patients and is one of the most
commonly misdiagnosed neurologic disorders.
The main objective of the project is to validate
technically, functionally and clinically, a novel system for
understanding, giving support to diagnosis, and remotely managing
tremors. The system will comprise two platforms:
- The hospital-based platform. It will provide with detailed
recordings of the central and peripheral nervous systems together with
kinematic measurements. It will constitute the most advanced system to
date for neurophysiological investigation of tremors, and will implement
a novel machine tool to support diagnosis of tremors.
- The neuroprosthetic platform. It will constitute a novel
alternative for remote management of upper limb tremors. It will exploit
neural and kinematic recordings both to drive a closed loop system to
attenuate tremors based on neurostimulation of the afferent pathways,
and to evaluate the status and evolution of the disorder. The platform
will thus permit the neurologist remotely monitoring and adjusting the
therapy.
For more information about the NeuroTREMOR project please visit the main NeuroTREMOR homepage!
Role of System Software Laboratory in the NeuroTREMOR project
UM partner is responsible for implementation and functional validation of
advanced machine-based algorithms to support diagnosis of tremor and
characterization from EEG and for extraction of individual motor unsit
characteristic from multichannel surface and intramuscular EMG. This includes (Figure 1):
- Concept design for the hospital-based platform
- Concept design of algorithms to support tremor diagnosis
- Study of neural connectivity in ET and PD patients
- Algorithms for extraction of tremor features from EEG
- Algorithms for extraction of tremor features from muscle activity
- Algorithms for extraction of tremor features from IMUs
- Extraction of context information from IMU signals
- Development of the tool for machine support to tremor diagnosis
- Exploitation of neurophysiological and clinical data to identify subgroups of PD and ET patients.
- Definition of metrics that characterize the status and evolution of the patient and his therapy
Figure 1: Conceptual design
of multimodal BCI platform, consisting of EMG, EEG+MEG and IMU trackers of
pathological tremor.
More infromation about the Non-invasive insight into electrical activity of human muscles can be found here.
The University of Maribor (UM) team
Project partners
This project is funded by the Commission of the European Union, within
Framework 7, specific ICT Challenge 5 "ICT for Health, Ageing Well,
Inclusion and Governance", Target outcome 5.1 ”Personal Health Systems
(PHS)”, under Grant Agreement number ICT-2011.5.1-287739, "NeuroTREMOR: A
novel concept for support to diagnosis and remote management of
tremor."
