Objective: We aim to characterise tremulous head movements in cervical dystonia during eccentric left- and right-going head rotations.

Background: Cervical dystonia is the most common adult-onset isolated focal dystonia. It is characterized by abnormal posturing of the head. Additionally, 28-68% of patients have abnormal head movements. Several studies demonstrated that voluntary head movements in cervical dystonia are slow, which may be due to frequent pauses during the head turns.

Methods: Cervical dystonia patients were asked to complete a modified Posner task in which head movements towards eccentrically located targets were employed as the response. A virtual reality head mounted display (Oculus Rift DK2) was employed to simultaneously acquire movement data and present visual stimulus. A frequency analysis of the collected rotational data was carried out with the aim of better characterizing these head tremors on a subject-by-subject basis.

Results: Results demonstrate that the Oculus Rift is a useful tool for the analysis of tremor in cervical dystonia. The results reveal that factors such as target angle and target side have a significant effect on tremor severity and suggest that the current paradigm is useful for characterizations of these tremulous head movements and as a measure of tremor severity on a single patient basis.

Conclusions: The Oculus Rift can be employed as an effective tool to quantitatively characterise head tremors. This paradigm and analysis have utility as a diagnostic tool which could become useful in the diagnostic test to determine patient head tremors. * I. B. and B. Q. contributed equally to this work.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/investigation-of-head-tremor-in-cervical-dystonia-novel-application-of-virtual-reality-head-mounted-display-the-oculus-rift/