Upper limb motor skills performance evaluation based on point-and-click cursor trajectory analysis: Application in early multiple sclerosis detection

Abstract

We present an enhanced version of the input device evaluation application (IDEA) system as an objective method for evaluating upper limb motor skills performance. By introducing three new metrics for mouse cursor trajectory analysis, along with the application of the two-dimensional (2D) experiment in the case of multiple sclerosis (MS), we examine the sensitivity of the IDEA system for differentiating patients with early-stage MS and healthy participants. The IDEA system calculates multiple kinematic metrics for point-and-click tasks: Movement time, index of difficulty, effective target width, effective index of difficulty, throughput, missed clicks, target re-entry, task axis crossing, movement direction change, orthogonal direction change, movement variability, movement error, movement offset, mean velocity, velocity peaks, and maximum/mean velocity ratio. The results reveal that the IDEA system sensitivity has been improved in comparison with previous studies, which is high enough to detect the presence of early-stage MS with a 70.9% success rate in the 2D experiment.