Crit 2 – Stabilizing Device for Tremors

Premise

My family and I struggle with a progressive nervous system disorder that causes an essential tremor that starts in your hands when you’re younger (i.e. me), and migrates throughout your body as you get older (i.e. my mom).

Proposal

For this project I wanted to look into ways to help stabilize things you’re holding if you have a tremor. I made this device that uses an accelerometer to detect movement, and offset that movement by using 2 servo motors to control the x and y rotations.

To do this I researched Quaternions and Spatial Rotations.

There are three different state options: stabilizer: help for when you need to hold something still; pouring: help for when you need to pour something; normal: device does nothing.

Proof of Concept

Because of the complexity of offsetting movements and the fact that I am not knowledgeable enough with physics, I found it really difficult to make the stabilizer and pouring states work together. Hence, the demonstration above only shows the stabilizing state.

Adding to that, I struggled with the adjustment between the relationship of input data and sensitivity/stability of the device. In other words, I didn’t know how to make sure the device doesn’t jitter as much while reading live data. For future iterations, learning how to normalize the input data should help.

Fritzing Circuit Sketch

stabilizer_code

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.