Upper limb movement in children with motor impairment v.1
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Motion capture and functional assessment in upper limb motor impairment in children - a feasibility study.
IRAS ID
142627
Contact name
Adam Shortland
Contact email
Research summary
It is common to record videos of movement assessments in children with motor impairments for the purpose of scoring their upper limb function. We wish to improve the capacity of the assessment to inform intervention by quantifying the movement pattern.
For the quantification of joint angles across a range of movements in the clinic setting, we require a motion capture system that does not interfere with the clinical assessment. The Kinect™ is an extension to the Xbox™ platform, it captures the movement of the gamers to control the Avatar in the game. Microsoft™ have a software development kit to allow developers to write applications involving movement capture.
We have piloted the use of the Kinect™ to capture data for remotely controlling a robot as well as some successful experimentation of recording elbow joint angles.
We will compare recorded data from the Kinect™, or similar, and from a gold standard motion capture system for a range of movements at the shoulder elbow and wrist in typically-developing adult subjects in order to validate the Kinect™, or similar, for this use. We will find out which subset of movement tasks from a standard functional assessment (Assisted Hand Assessment AHA and Shriner's Hospital for Children Upper Extremity Evaluation (SHUEE) ) may be consistently visualised by the Kinect™. We will use the Kinect™ during the assessment of a number of children with upper motor neuron lesions affecting upper limb movement in clinics at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital, and in typically-developing children.
We will analyse movement using statistical descriptors characterising the frequency distribution of joint angles adopted by the patient during each of the tasks. We will compare the motion descriptors with the performance score of the child during each task. Our hypothesis is that functional deficits will be related to limitations in the joint ranges of the subject.REC name
North West - Greater Manchester South Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/NW/1194
Date of REC Opinion
18 Sep 2014
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion