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Article on upper limb motion analysis published in Applied Sciences

Our work on “Mapping of the Upper Limb Work-Space: Benchmarking Four Wrist Smoothness Metrics“, led by Alessandro Scano, Cristina Brambilla, Henning Müller and Manfredo Atzori has been published in the Applied Sciences journal, MDPI.

Smoothness-based models describe effectively skilled motion planning. Despite smoothness being often used as a measure of motor control and to evaluate clinical pathologies, so far, a smoothness map is not available for the whole workspace of the upper limb. In this work, we provide a map of the upper limb workspace comparing four smoothness metrics: the normalized jerk, the speed metric, the spectral arc length, and the number of speed peaks.

More details in the article available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/12/24/12643

Scheme of the work. Upper limb movements (P2P and EXP) were performed in 5 sectors of the workspace by 15 subjects. The data were segmented in phases and the wrist kinematics and the articular angels were computed. Then, four smoothness metrics based on wrist motion were computed and smoothness was compared between sectors, mapped with respect to articular angles and in the 3D workspace for each of the smoothness metric. Finally, the correlations between pairs of metrics were computed.