Development of a Mobile Phone Application for Measuring Muscle Shaking (tremor) in Order to Simplify Medical Diagnostics

Abstract: At the moment, there is no quick and easy method to measure muscle shaking (tremor) reliably. In order to avoid long waiting times for an Electromyography (EMG) investigation, this thesis aims to create an Android smartphone application capable of measuring muscle tremor at a moment’s notice. A previous attempt has been made showing promising results but no sign of follow-through has been found. This thesis project was specifically requested by researchers from the Center for Neurology at the Academic Specialist Center, whom have the resources to continue to develop the project given useful results. The results of this thesis project was a deliverable Android mobile application, developed using the programming language Kotlin in Google’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Android Studio. The application implements the software architectural design pattern Model View View-Model (MVVM) in order to make the code modular as well as easily maintainable in the future. In terms of User Interface, the application follows the familiar and popular design system by Google called Material Design, with the purpose of making the application intuitive and easy to use. The work process consisted mainly of iteratively collecting feedback from the project’s stakeholders. The results of the application’s tremor measurement were acquired by conducting a small patient trial, where the application’s frequency analysis was compared against a third-party application. Using an Electromyograph as the "true" answer, it was found that the application developed for this thesis gave results closer to the Electromyograph than the third-party application. To continue this research, the codebase for this project can be built upon to use external accelerometers to acquire measurements of several limbs at the same time. A further continuation could also be to encrypt the measurement data to increase privacy.