Influence of Fatigue on the Physiological Tremor in Non-diabetic and Diabetic Persons: Preliminary Study

In this work, we explored physiological tremor during the performance of different tasks and compared the fatigue effects on tremor in four non-diabetic and four type 2 diabetic subjects. A triaxial accelerometer worn on the participant's dominant hand's wrist and finger was used for tremor detection. During the experiment, the resting, posture and action tasks were performed to carry out three stages: pre-fatigue, fatigue, and post-fatigue. Frequency and amplitude were computed to observe and estimate the handshaking during the tasks' implementation. We established that non-diabetic and diabetic participants exhibit a similar trend in the frequency and amplitude curves during the pre- and post-fatigue stages, as well as in the fatigue stage. The distinction between finger and wrist data was negligible. It was observed that the amplitude remains unaffected by the fatigue tasks. The power spectral density distribution and standard deviation in the three frequency ranges (3-8, 8-14, and 14-22 Hz) changed depending on the task performed. During rest tasks, the number of peaks was mainly in the first interval. When participants performed effort tasks, this number grew slightly in the second interval at the expense of the peaks in the first.