Adaptive filtering of physiological tremor for real-time compensation

Physiological tremor is one of the main cause for human imprecision during micro surgery. Accurate filtering of physiological tremor is extremely important for compensation in robotics assisted micro-surgical instruments/procedures. A study on surgeon´s tremor is conducted and the characteristics of the tremor band and its nature are analyzed. An adaptive filtering approach is developed to estimate the modulated signals with multiple frequency components for filtering and compensation of tremor in real-time. The proposed method is compared with the existing weighted-frequency Fourier linear combiner (WFLC) algorithm on the tremor data of surgeons/subjects. Critical validation of the algorithm is performed and experiments are conducted for 1-DOF cancellation of tremor.