Objective

Physiotherapists are demanding of valid outcome measures to assess the evolution of their patient’s motor functions in order to precisely describe the effects of treatments and the progress of diseases. Hence, several scales such as the motor function measure (MFM) have been developed with the aim to measure, with validity and reproducibility and sensitivity, the motor functions of patients with neuromuscular disease. The originality of our approach is to quantitatively measure the children’s motor functions with a low-cost, non-invasive and plug and play technological tool that avoid the uncertain characteristic of human evaluation and increase children’s involvement. This project aims to propose a precise and reproducible tool to be used as an outcome measure for the MFM protocol in clinical trials.

Materials/patients and methods

This study focus on children from 6 to 18 years old with spinal muscular atrophy type 2 or 3 (SMA). The MFM protocol and its 32 items were selected. Firstly, to analyze the relevance of the 32 items in our context (MFM for SMA), the MFM’s items were subjected to experts through a Delphi process. This process has enabled the extraction of specific items for SMA patients. Secondly, for each specified items, the technological needs in terms of detection and analysis were identified leading to the Microsoft Kinect as a preferential sensor which presents interesting measurements and advantageous usages. This sensor associated with a software developed by our research team, KiMe2 (Kinetic Medical Measurement), permits to automatically score and provide advices for MFM’s items.

Results

Experiments were proposed to adjust and validate the relevance of the KiMe2’s score and advices. The first experiments made on selected items from the MFM with 5 volunteer patients showed good correlation between the score and opinions generated by our tool and the practicians’ evaluation.

Discussion/Conclusion

The current tool may lack precision and ability to score specific cases. This project’s future is to improve this tool in a twofold perspective:

– to be able to fully deal all MFM’s items and;

– to take advantage of the Kinect’s gaming features in order to develop entertaining activities for the MFM’s practice.