A preliminary study on the validation of an automatic measurement method for functional reach assessment by stereophotogrammetry

In this work a preliminary study is proposed to assess the validity of an automatic and low cost measurement method for Functional ReachTest (FRT) implementation. To this aim FRT was performed on 10 trials of 4 healthy men and results from the system under validation are compared with the corresponding data from a calibrated stereo-photogrammetric system: the percentage variation between them is lower than 3% in all subjects - 3 outlier trials excluded - and it is significantly lower than the percentage variation obtained in daily clinical practice. Since none of the subjects is affected by pathologies, all of themhave normal visual acuity and have been trained to the experimental procedure, uncertainty of the outcomes may be mainly attributed to the calibration procedure and to the measurement system. Anyway results seem to confirm that the proposed system can be used to support the physician in acquiring the clinical information about the motor control deterioration or restoring in patients with various pathologies. Despite the encouraging results, further studies are needed to achieve a more accurate and quantitative evaluation of the sources of uncertainty, i.e. by extending the population sample and increasing the number of trials with the support of a Monte Carlo simulation.