Automating the assessment of rehabilitative grasp and reach

Accurate clinical assessment of a patient´s condition is paramount to providing the type and intensity of therapy for patients. Currently, typical objective assessments require therapists to subjectively grade various tasks patients have to do. Also, the administration of these assessments are onerous and error prone. In our approach we embed sensors into objects used in the assessments. By using this we are able to accurately measure and assess the ability of a patient to perform various tasks, in this case, grasping and reaching actions. We analyse various ways to measure the movement and thereby obtain a quantitative metric of a patient´s grasping ability. We also are able to capture the nuances of movements which are not easily obtainable by other means. Thus we have the ability to comprehensively profile a subject´s movements in novel and detailed ways which lead to better objective assessments of their behaviour.