Physiological tremor sensing using only accelerometers for real-time compensation

A hand-held tremor compensation instrument, Micron, has been under research recently. The sensing part of the instrument comprises a magnetometer and accelerometers. The use of the magnetometer is to provide accurate instrument orientation information. The drawbacks of relying on the magnetometer include the requirement for on-site calibration of the magnetometer and sub-optimal estimation of the tremor due to sub-optimal estimation of the instrument orientation. To eliminate the problems associated with the magnetometer, an algorithm of sensing the tremor using only accelerometers is proposed. The algorithm is tested with real accelerometer output data and the results are shown and discussed.