Abstract
There are a large number of people who are suffering for tremor and undergoing various kinds of inconveniences to perform daily tasks. In this project, we focused on the writing task of tremor patients and developed three prototype pens for the patients. The each pen consists of a hollow pen shell, a pen-rod, and a spring-damper element that passively isolates the pen-rod from the vibration of the pen shell held by tremor patients while preserving the writing action. Based on the principles of vibration isolation, double-leaf spring is selected and examined as the spring-damper element to isolate the pen rod from the dominant directed vibration of hand tremor. Double-leaf spring is designed and analyzed using SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks. The prototype verifies that proposed pen significantly improves the legibility of handwriting by tremor patients. For future study, considering other than dominant directed vibration of hand tremor, further developments of other kinds of spring-damper elements such as sponge and magnet may be considered.