Feasibility of Using Microsoft Kinect to Assess Upper Limb Movement in Type III Spinal Muscular Atrophy Patients.

Xing Chen,Christian Czech,Juliane Siebourg-Polster,Omar Khwaja,Martin Strahm,Dirk Fischer,Detlef Wolf,Ulrike Bonati,Thomas H Gillingwater

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0170472

Abstract

Although functional rating scales are being used increasingly as primary outcome measures in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), sensitive and objective assessment of early-stage disease progression and drug efficacy remains challenging. We have developed a game based on the Microsoft Kinect sensor, specifically designed to measure active upper limb movement. An explorative study was conducted to determine the feasibility of this new tool in 18 ambulant SMA type III patients and 19 age- and gender-matched healthy controls. Upper limb movement was analysed elaborately through derived features such as elbow flexion and extension angles, arm lifting angle, velocity and acceleration. No significant differences were found in the active range of motion between ambulant SMA type III patients and controls. Hand velocity was found to be different but further validation is necessary. This study presents an important step in the process of designing and handling digital biomarkers as complementary outcome measures for clinical trials.

Highlights

Since the introduction of the Microsoft Kinect sensor in 2010 together with its software development kit (SDK), its value as a low cost, portable and marker-free motion capture system has been widely examined
To obtain detailed and objective outcome measures for upper body movement, we developed a Kinect game designed to capture limitations in active joint motion and the game was adopted in a clinical study to determine the feasibility of using the Microsoft Kinect sensor to rate patients with spinal muscular atrophy
To provide this user-friendly gaming interface which is appealing to both children and adults as well as to retrieve skeleton information from the Microsoft Kinect sensors application programming interface (API), Java programming language was used

Summary

Introduction

Since the introduction of the Microsoft Kinect sensor in 2010 together with its software development kit (SDK), its value as a low cost, portable and marker-free motion capture system has been widely examined. It was shown that in SMA patients the reduced range for joint motion in shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, knee and ankle were positively correlated with functional scales [30, 31] Such values, previously recorded with transparent goniometers [30] can be obtained and analysed using the body points locations recorded by the Kinect sensors. To obtain detailed and objective outcome measures for upper body movement, we developed a Kinect game designed to capture limitations in active joint motion and the game was adopted in a clinical study to determine the feasibility of using the Microsoft Kinect sensor to rate patients with spinal muscular atrophy

Methods

Results

Discussion