Developing a baseline for upper-body motor skill assessment using a robotic kinematic model

In the rehabilitation field, determining the effectiveness of an intervention protocol begins by comparing the individual's movement characteristics against a baseline. In most settings, this baseline is determined through clinical studies involving a range of patients belonging to the same demographic group. Unfortunately, this leads to a process that is difficult to repeat for all patient demographics, or all movement characteristics, given the demands on clinicians' and patients' time for performing such clinical baseline measurement studies. To address this issue, we discuss a method that allows clinicians to objectively assess an individual's movements and compare the resulting outcome kinematic metrics to a kinematic baseline. Instead of collecting human patient data, we propose a robotic kinematic model that generates a baseline for different kinematic parameters in real-time as a function of the state of a given task. We evaluate our methodology on elbow and shoulder range of motion (ROM) angles obtained from eleven typically developing children. We compare the user's ROM angles to those generated by the proposed model, and discuss the potential of the model to be used in various intervention protocols.