A novel concept for support to diagnosis and remote management of tremor

Tremor is the most common movement disorder and is strongly increasing in incidence and prevalence with ageing. The most frequent types of tremor are those arising from two neurodegenerative disorders: Parkinsons disease and essential tremor. Although not life threatening, upper limb tremors hamper independent life of 65% of those suffering from them, greatly impacting on their quality of life. Tremor is not effectively managed in 25 % of patients and is one of the most commonly misdiagnosed neurologic disorders.

The main objective of the project is to validate technically, functionally and clinically, a novel system for understanding, giving support to diagnosis, and remotely managing tremors. The system will comprise two platforms:
- The hospital-based platform will provide with detailed recordings of the central and peripheral nervous systems together with kinematic measurements. It will constitute the most advanced system to date for neurophysiological investigation of tremors, and will implement a novel machine tool to support diagnosis of tremors.
- The neuroprosthetic platform will constitute a novel alternative for remote management of upper limb tremors. It will exploit neural and kinematic recordings both to drive a closed loop system to attenuate tremors based on neurostimulation of the afferent pathways, and to evaluate the status and evolution of the disorder. The platform will thus permit the neurologist remotely monitoring and adjusting the therapy.

NeuroTREMOR consortium brings together world-class institutions in their respective fields. Some of the partners collaborated previously in the framework of EU and NIH projects aiming at understanding and managing tremor pathologies, accumulating considerable experience on proposing and validating novel therapies for tremor treatment. The consortium is strongly multidisciplinary with almost no overlapping of expertise among partners.