Extraction of tremor for control of neural prostheses: Comparison of Discrete Wavelet Transform and Butterworth filter

Neural prostheses (NP) for tremor reduction rely on the information of tremor frequencies and their intensity and timing. Better estimation of tremor is important for reliable input to NP. In this work we compare two methods for tremor extraction. Discrete Wavelet Transform and Butterworth filter were used to decompose pathological volitional forearm movement into its slow and fast components. Slow signal is associated with volitional motion while the fast rhythmic signal is the result of involuntary muscular contraction (tremor). Our results suggest that in absence of prior knowledge about tremor frequency characteristics, Wavelet filtering has advantage over other conventional filtering methods.