Abstract—Parkinson’s Disease is one of the neurologic disease which affects a person body movements and the condition tend to gradually worsen with time. The person experiencing this type of disease usually suffers from three main symptoms which are rigidity, bradykinesia and tremor. The reason for these three symptoms is said to be due to the degeneration of dopaminergic neuron which produce a chemical to assist signal transfer inside the brain especially for the part that control body movement. The degeneration in turn disrupts the ability of the brain to control body movement. This paper intends to identify the characteristics of tremor produced by Parkinson’s Disease patients. A tri-axes accelerometer was used in this study to record the tremor signal generated from the patient’s hand and leg. The experiment was conducted on the body parts based on two activation condition of tremor which is resting condition and postural condition. The analysis done on the data collected showed that the tremor recorded had a mean peak frequency of about 5.89Hz, and this corresponds with the frequency range stated in the previous publication. Furthermore, based on the frequency plots of the tremor signals, it shows that for postural condition it is possible to measure the tremor from only one axis as the all three axes shows similar dominant frequency.

Index Terms—tremor, Parkinson’s disease, accelerometer

Cite: Muhammad Hafiz Soad, Mohd Zarhamdy Md. Zain, Mohamed Hussein, and Maziah Mohamad, "Parkinson’s Disease Tremor Characteristic Identification: An Experimental Study," Journal of Image and Graphics, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 136-140, December 2016. doi: 10.18178/joig.4.2.136-140