1. A Review on Wearable Technologies for Tremor Suppression
- Author
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Julio S. Lora-Millan, Gabriel Delgado-Oleas, Julián Benito-León, Eduardo Rocon, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (España), Ministerio de Universidades (España), Lora-Millán, Julio S., Benito-León, Julián, Rocón, Eduardo, Lora-Millán, Julio S. [0000-0001-5968-5786], Benito-León, Julián [0000-0002-1769-4809], and Rocón, Eduardo [0000-0001-9618-2176]
- Subjects
medicine.medical_specialty ,Parkinson's disease ,Activities of daily living ,Wearable device ,Context (language use) ,wearable device ,Review ,Pathological tremor ,Physical medicine and rehabilitation ,Assistive technology ,assistive technology ,medicine ,essential tremor ,RC346-429 ,Wearable technology ,neurorehabiliation ,Neurorehabiliation ,Essential tremor ,business.industry ,medicine.disease ,Exoskeleton ,nervous system diseases ,Neurology ,Parkinson’s disease ,Neurology (clinical) ,Neurology. Diseases of the nervous system ,pathological tremor ,business ,Afferent stimulation - Abstract
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., Tremor is defined as a rhythmic, involuntary oscillatory movement of a body part. Although everyone exhibits a certain degree of tremor, some pathologies lead to very disabling tremors. These pathological tremors constitute the most prevalent movement disorder, and they imply severe difficulties in performing activities of daily living. Although tremors are currently managed through pharmacotherapy or surgery, these treatments present significant associated drawbacks: drugs often induce side effects and show decreased effectiveness over years of use, while surgery is a hazardous procedure for a very low percentage of eligible patients. In this context, recent research demonstrated the feasibility of managing upper limb tremors through wearable technologies that suppress tremors by modifying limb biomechanics or applying counteracting forces. Furthermore, recent experiments with transcutaneous afferent stimulation showed significant tremor attenuation. In this regard, this article reviews the devices developed following these tremor management paradigms, such as robotic exoskeletons, soft robotic exoskeletons, and transcutaneous neurostimulators. These works are presented, and their effectiveness is discussed. The article also evaluates the different metrics used for the validation of these devices and the lack of a standard validation procedure that allows the comparison among them., This research was funded by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, project Discover2Walk (PID2019-105110RBC31). JL-M received a Training Program for Academic Staff fellowship (FPU16/01313) from the Ministry of Universities of the Government of Spain. GD-O received an international postgraduate scholarship from Secretaria Nacional de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación of Ecuador (SENESCYT). We acknowledge support of the publication fee by the CSIC Open Access Publication Support Initiative through its Unit of Information Resources for Research (URICI).
- Published
- 2021