Motion Capture Sensing for Measuring Progress of Therapeutic Intervention

The goal of this project is to design and build a new technology to track arm movements in children with cerebral palsy (CP) and or other developmental disabilities.  The long-term goal of this work is to help improve quality of life of individuals with cerebral palsy (CP) and other movement disorders through monitoring arm movement during rehabilitation sessions and activities that are often done throughout the day.  This information will allow clinicians to develop personalized interventions.  Currently, clinicians are not able to track and monitor arm movement in non-laboratory settings. It is believed that using motion capture technologies the clinicians will be able to identify individual movement challenges and provide treatment targets for children with CP in clinical and home settings. While the ultimate goal of this study team is to characterize upper extremity movement in typically developing children and children with CP, the technology being developed could have broad applications for tracking movement in a variety of environments such as clinics and home settings. The fiber optic curvature sensing system (FOCUS) that will be developed will be compared to the camera-based motion capture methods to determine whether the new system is able to measure the same information as the three-dimensional camera-based system.