Pathological tremor management: Modelling, compensatory technology and evaluation

A great deal of effort has been devoted in the past decades in the generic area of tremor management. Specific topics of modelling for objective classification of pathological tremor out of kinematics and physiological data, compensatory technologies and evaluation rating tools are just a few examples of application field. This paper introduces a comprehensive review of research work in this generic field during the last decades. In particular special focus has been put on the systems approach and thus a specific section on modelling has been included. Aspects related to experimental protocol and tremor pattern identification are reviewed in detail with the aim of drawing a practical guideline when compensatory technology has to be developed. The current status on ambulatory and non-ambulatory tremor reduction technologies is given in the section devoted to tremor management. Here compensatory technologies are classified according to the tremor isolation and the tremor reduction approaches. Eventually, we finish our discussion with those aspects related to tremor evaluation.