A low-cost stand-alone platform for measuring motor behavior across developmental applications

Motion tracking provides unique insights into motor, cognitive, and social development by capturing subtle variations into how movements are planned and controlled. Here, we present a low-cost, wearable movement measurement platform, KiD, specifically designed for tracking the movements of infants and children in a variety of natural settings. KiD consists of a small, lightweight sensor containing a nine-axis inertial measurement unit plus an integrated processor for computing rotations. Measurements of three-dimensional acceleration using KiD compare well with those of current state-of-the-art optical motion capture systems. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate successful classification of different types of sinusoidal right arm movements using KiD.

Automated summary

Motion tracking provides unique insights into motor, cognitive, and social development by capturing subtle variations in how movements are planned and controlled. The KiD platform, a low-cost wearable movement measurement system, is specifically designed to track infants and children in natural settings, and has shown good correlation with current optical motion capture systems. Demonstrations using KiD have successfully classified different types of arm movements as a proof of concept.