Android Giveaway of the Day - Fast test for fine motor skills

1. Due to the presence of involuntary movements of various parts of the body, the intention of a person to maintain a given pose does not lead to a fixed position of the body in normal situation, but to the imperceptible motion which is controlled by feelings: proprioception, vision, touch, etc. The measured parameters of these movements allow us to assess the accuracy of our actions their intellectual capabilities at the moment.
2. Movements of hands, feet and fingers are the most accurate ones. As recent studies have shown, the accuracy characteristics of these movements give an assessment of the fluid intelligence of the person, that is, the ability to solve new problems that require inventiveness and the ability to perform complex actions in a real situation. It was also found that the development of the speech by small children and their future academic successes are directly related to the quality of fine motor skills. These facts give grounds to assume that the average amplitudes of fine motor skills movements in the processes of maintaining the prescribed pose characterize the quality of the human motion control system as a whole.
3. The proposed application turns a smartphone (tablet) into an instrument that quantifies the error of human movements when using for control only proprioception, or proprioception and vision (visual and motor coordination). Since the application uses data generated by the accelerometer sensor, the application must be installed on devices that have such sensors. Also the device needs to run Android operating system v.4.2 or above.
We believe that the application can be useful for those involved in sports, music, dance, painting, educating children, medical practice and all those who are interested in their own state of health.
4. The application registers and uses for analysis of movements the angle α between the perpendicular to the plane of the smartphone and the direction of gravity.
5. The measurements are made during the test, which consists of repeating the attempts, determined by the set of parameters specified at the beginning of the test.
6. Below you will find a description of the test, and some recommendations on how to conduct it.
A single-color image of an object or symbol (stimulus) on a homogeneous background of the same color tone is displayed on the device screen. During the test, the brightness of the background remains constant, while the brightness of the stimulus varies with the angle α. When researching visual - motor control, you should take the device in your hand (in your hands) and from the moment of the start to tilt it in such a way as to achieve the merging of the stimulus and background.
The result of each attempt is:
a) value of the average deviation of the inclination angle of the smartphone from the tilt angle at the moment of start, which estimates the accuracy of the task;
b) percentage histogram of the brightness difference values between the background and the stimulus.
7. The maximum accuracy of these measurements is achieved when the device is close to the horizontal and the direction of the subject's view is approximately perpendicular to the plane of the screen.
8. When examining proprioceptive control of a pose, you should take the device in your hand (in the hands) and from the moment of start hold it in the palm in the starting position, without looking at the screen of the device.
9. Note the difference between the results of these two experiments.
10. By transferring an image from the device's screen to the monitor screen, you can get assessments of the quality of control of other parts of the body by attaching a smartphone to them and guided by the image on the computer screen.
11.User's manual and examples of the application using can be found on our website http://ma-tec.ru/.