Abstract

Considering that the Parkinson disease is a neurodegenerative, progressive and incurable pathology, and with the purpose of improving ill people life quality, the design and construction of a mechatronic device was proposed to help mitigating the involuntary movements produced by the disease. This device allows the analysis of the involuntary movements of pronosupination generated in the upper limbs using electromyographic signals produced by the muscles of the forearm and an algorithm based on artificial neural networks. To materialize the device, fast prototyping like 3D printing and the V model-based mechatronics methodology were considered. As a result of this investigation, a mechatronics device in the shape of an exoskeleton controlled by an embedded system which analyses, processes electromyographic signals and using neural networks allows tremor and involuntary movements classification produced by each patient. The system operation results are: for tremor prediction is 96.88% of success, and for the involuntary movement prediction is 100 % of success.