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Fitts' Law Based Performance Metrics to Quantify Tremor in Individuals With Essential Tremor.
IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
|December 1, 2021
Summary
This study introduces new metrics from Fitts' law tasks to quantify essential tremor (ET) severity and frequency. These novel Fitts' law metrics offer a low-cost, home-based approach for objective essential tremor assessment.
Area of Science:
- Neurology
- Biomedical Engineering
- Human-Computer Interaction
Background:
- Current essential tremor (ET) evaluation methods are subjective or use limited metrics.
- Objective, low-cost, and home-based tremor quantification is needed.
Purpose of the Study:
- To explore performance metrics from Fitts' law tasks for tremor quantification.
- To analyze cursor movements during drawing tasks using a 3D mouse for individuals with ET.
Main Methods:
- 11 ET patients and 3 controls performed spiral navigation, rectangular track navigation, and multi-directional tapping tasks using a 3D mouse.
- Performance metrics including Outside Area (OA), Throughput (TP), Path Efficiency (PE), and Completion Time (CT) were analyzed.
- Correlations were made between Fitts' law metrics, accelerometer data, and Essential Tremor Rating Assessment Scale (TETRAS) scores.
Main Results:
- Outside Area (OA) in spiral and rectangular tasks strongly correlated with ET severity (R² = 0.57, R² = 0.83).
- Throughput (TP) in multi-directional tapping tasks correlated with ET frequency (R² = 0.70).
- OA metrics may offer an independent measure, increasing tremor characterization dimensionality.
Conclusions:
- Fitts' law tasks provide feasible, novel metrics for essential tremor quantification.
- These metrics can be expanded for repeatable, multi-dimensional tremor data analysis.
- This approach enables low-cost, home-based tremor assessment.
