Biomechanical Model to Evaluate Movement Characteristics in Infants

Abstract

Brain development occurs before and after birth, it is important to determine if an infant would present a developmental disorder such as cerebral palsy. If the case, it is important to start rehabilitation and get to the fullest functional capacity they could at young age. There are different methods to determine a possible developmental disorder such as brain imaging and clinical assessments. One of the methods that has resulted in positive outcomes is based on the spontaneous movements presented by the infants known as General Movements, one of the problems with this method is that is based on the clinician expertise. 3D motion analysis is a technology that allow us to evaluate any movement on all their axis and obtain kinematic characteristics such as velocity, acceleration and smoothness. In this work we proposed a biomechanical model of the full body of the new born to determine if we could study the movement pattern characteristic presented on young infants, we only presented the circular movement pattern on both feet created by a full-term 2-month-old during 5 min obtaining similarities on smoothness, and differences on velocity and acceleration. The results obtained on this study encourage us to create a pilot study in order to assess the general movements presented on infants and to determine the specific characteristics of these movements, with the future aim to evaluate pre-term infants and know if there is a possible developmental disorder.