Design of a tremor suppression orthosis based on structured fabrics

Abstract

The number of people suffering from Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is increasing continuously, Parkinson’s disease often manifests symptoms of pathological tremors, which can seriously infect the patient’s daily life. There are no effective methods of curing Parkinson’s disease at the moment but to lessen the symptoms by suppressing the tremorous movements. Auxiliary equipment like orthosis and exoskeleton makes this possible, current designs of tremor suppression orthosis have problems of lack of portability and tremor suppression efficacy. To solve these problems, the dissertation proposes a lightweight, semi-active orthosis design based on structured fabrics. The orthosis takes advantage of a newly developed fabric material with tuneable properties, the material is soft in a relaxed state and can become stiff when the vacuum is applied. Two orthosis configurations were proposed, one with a single damper and the other with two dampers. The experiments show that the orthosis can restrict the flexibility of the wrist by 65% and 70% with single and double-damper configurations; the orthosis can also restrict the range of movements by 60% and 70% respectively in terms of the range of motion when the wrist is shaking.