Evaluation of the fine motor skills of children with DCD using the digitalised visual-motor tracking system

The study on the coordination between vision and motion of children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) can help understand the mechanism of DCD for timely and appropriate intervention. Whereas the existing visual-motor integrated systems rely on markers attached to the subject to track the eye gaze and body movements, which is too expensive and not suitable for DCD assessment. In this study, a markerless visual-motor tracking system which consists of an eye-tracker used to track the eye gaze and a Kinect used to capture the body movements is designed to monitor the behaviour of children in the fine motor tasks. Then the eye gaze position of the subject is matched into the motion image captured by Kinect. The current data of children placing pegs captured by the proposed system are analyzed quantitatively. We find that the visual movement speed of the children with DCD or at risk of DCD is slower than that of the typical developing children to focus on the target while their hand movement speed is almost the same. In addition to DCD analysis, the proposed system is meaningful to the monitoring of other diseases related to visual-motor coordination.