Measurement and evaluation of finger tapping movements using magnetic sensors

This paper proposes a quantitative measurement and evaluation method of finger tapping movements for diagnosis support and assessment of motor function. In this method, a magnetic sensor consisting of two coils is used to measure movement. The coil voltage induced by the electromagnetic induction law changes depending on the distance between the two coils; this enables estimation of the distance between two coil-bearing fingertips from the voltage measured by the nonlinear modeling relationships between the voltages and distances. Further, the finger movements measured are evaluated by computing ten indices such as the finger tapping interval, and radar charts of the evaluation indices and phase-plane trajectories of the finger movements are then displayed in real time on a monitor. Evaluation experiments were performed on finger movement in 16 Parkinson´s disease patients and 32 normal elderly subjects, with the results showing that all evaluation indices differ significantly for each subject (p < 0.05).