AtaxiaV
Measuring movement so patients with ataxia can be assessed and treated better.
Ataxia is a group of neurological conditions that affect coordination, balance, speech and movement. A doctor’s scale gives a score at one appointment. AtaxiaV, a medical engineering project at Voice of Calling, measures the movement itself, quantitatively and over time.
Three generations
Version 1 (2019): a browser tool. Dysmetria is a reduction in the ability to control the path, speed and force of a movement. AtaxiaV’s first version measures it with a touch screen: patients trace diagonals, circles, rectangles, triangles and targets, and our algorithm turns the coordinates into measurements of how severe the upper-limb ataxia is. Version 1 is patent pending.
Version 2 (2020): 3D with OpenCV. The test moved from a flat screen to a three-dimensional environment, tracked with a camera.
Version 3 (2022): diagnosis and rehabilitation. While studying patients’ cases we learned that accurate diagnosis for children is crucial, and that no rehabilitation tools were made for them. Universal treatments bore children and are hard to keep up. So we built a 3D game in Unity with a Leap Motion controller that works as both an evaluation system and a rehabilitation exercise. It needs relatively simple equipment and no professional assistant, so it is easy to access, which could make large-scale data collection possible, and in time help diagnose types of ataxia with machine learning.
Where it is today
AtaxiaV now sits within the Voice of Calling Life and Research Center, alongside the SARA-Q and CeMoQu tools. SARA-Q was a Top 5 finalist for the MIT Solve and Amgen Prize 2024, and the team presented at the Concordia Annual Summit and ICAR 2024. The full research story is on ataxiav.com.