What Can We Learn About Neurodevelopment by Studying the Kinematics of Simple Body Motions?

To understand how the nervous system develops people often study the brain directly. Here we posit that one can learn about neurodevelopment by studying the kinematic of simple body movements. We perform simple motions, like reaching or walking, everyday. Maturation of these motions are realized through a complex learning process at each milestone stage in our neurodevelopment. We conjectured that a detailed examination of such motion outputs may uncover some important biological information about typical neurodevelopment as well as the deviations in neurological disorders, like Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). To extract the potential physiological information, we examined the continuous motion outputs at millisecond time scales, introducing new mathematical metrics to assess possible hidden motion smoothness properties. Applying our metrics to reaching and natural walking motions showed that our metrics are capable of providing effective neurodevelopment assessments in both typical individuals and individuals with ASD. Our results show a surprising connection with several classical clinical psychiatric scores, like IQ etc., in the ASD cohort, providing a potential connection between motion performance and cognitive abilities in neurological disorders.