We have done similar work on activities of daily living using Qualisys Oqus motion capture cameras and QTM software. Accuracy is good for the arm, hand, wrist, but you would have to consider line of sight issues for fingers. What instruments? percussion?

Clickjoint from Aleasolution www.aleasol.ch

or

SimiM Motion www.simi.de

For 2D analysis there is simple software caled Kinovea

http://www.kinovea.org/

probably you need several IR base cameras to track fingers motion, you can use the Motion Analysis (WWW.motionanalysis.com) software(Cortex 2.1), i am working with that, its suitable for this kinds of research.

Best Regards

David

If you have grant to buy, I guess the best and most used system is Vicon (http://www.vicon.com). However, if you need something free, you can download the skillspector software (http://video4coach.com/?option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Itemid=30) and do all the analysis with regular digital cameras. Here in Brazil, we use both systems. Vicon for research and Skillspector to ilustrate kinematic analysis for our students.

I work on the development of softwares for motor behavior, such as Reaction Time, Tracking, Stroop, etc.

You can see my softwares on my site: http://okazaki.webs.com

Some of my softwares I let here in Research Gate on my publication. If you need something like that, just let me know.

Regards,

Victor Okazaki

Londrina State University - Brazil

It depends on your budget, and the level of detail that you need from your data.

- I can also recommend Kinovea as a good free download http://www.kinovea.org/. but data outputs are very basic

- Wired systems, such as minibird, are very accurate: although markers are attached to a cable, this can easily be strapped to the arm to avoid inhibiting simple reaching actions.

- There are basic but very practical and affordable optical systems that use inertial measurement units (I can give more details if needed). No wires and recording multiple markers is straight forward

- If you have the money, the gold standard is Vicon, which will sample at extremely high rates and output almost every kinematic variable that you need. Possibly overkill for what you need?

You may also try Tracker 2.80 by Open Source Physics (free software). It has several tools including auto-tracking) and was very usefull for me.

Depending on which segments you want to track I would recommend to use inertial sensors. Of course, if you need to track the movement of each finger no commercial solutions exist yet but if tracking of the hand or wrist is enough, then using inertial sensors is a good choice. There are a few companies such as xsens, apdm or shimmer that provide entire sensor packages. The trickiest part, and that goes for all measurement systems, including optical motion tracking, is the signal processing part and what for parameters you want to compute. I would first decide/choose/specify the parameters you need and then based on that select the most suited measurement system.

If you don't have as much money to spend you might consider an electromagnetic tracking system like the ones Polhemus makes (flock of birds). They're pretty good, and the nice thing about this sort of system is that you only need one sensor per segmant. With optical tracking you need 3 markers/segment to define all of your rotations/translations.

There are many third party software, you can use if u have standard c3d file format. or for video analysis you can use labview vision assistant which has many standard functions for angle and motion calculations.

If you have 3d motion analysis system, you can use this open-source software: Mokka http://b-tk.googlecode.com/svn/web/mokka/index.html

Currrently im using TEMA software which is a 3D motion analysis system in a study almost similar to yours.

I'm working with Templo Motion, from Contemplas GmbH Germany. It's not too expensive and has the opportunity to upgrade to Vicon based system. Work with full hd Hdv cameras at 60Hz and faster ones using other connections, if needed.

Another possibility would be Simi Motion, which also use videos to analyse the motion.

We are using Simi Motion (Simi Reality Motion Systems, Unterschleißheim, Germany) as well. It is quite expensive, but has a very user friendly interface (no coding neccessary). It also has some nice auto-tracking features that help to get the job done.

Well, we are using the Opti-track, with 8 cameras, in this case we use this system in order to obtain the specific angles through triangles, then, we use a kinematic model for corroborate the movement and obtain the behavior. On the other hand, if you want to do the work in 2D, you can use de Kinect in order to obtain difrent points in a cartesian plane, every point can be used as the center of the joints, and then generate the triangles with the necesary angles.

Vision systems are always a good option to track human movements but I think that fine movements on stroke patients should be easily assessed through instrumented gloves.

I'd go for IGS glove http://www.animazoo.com/content/igs-glove or cybergloves http://www.metamotion.com/hardware/motion-capture-hardware-gloves-Cybergloves.htm if your research is focused on hand movements.

Thanks everyone for all of this useful information. I should have mentioned that i use a Mac, so for 2D video analysis i have struggled to find anything other than 'motion pro'. Kinovea looks better, but i can't use it.

Hopefully, i am going to be able to get patients to a lab where codamotion is available, which will be very good news!

You have to wait just for https://www.leapmotion.com/

I suggest you to enter in the MATHWORKS site (the official producer of MATLAB software) and serch for some available programs which resolve your problem, or, alternatively, you pose in that site your question. Soon someone will answer you. Just do it. Bye

I am using Dartfish at the mo. It's 2D and very easy - the mobile app allows me to video my dancers on the spot and show them their movements, even measure degrees of range of motion with a finger drag.

Motion analysis softwares are always available together with the apparatuses that are recording the relative data. There are two possibilities:

1)-you use a commercial SW which analyses motion data. For this solution just watch in the internet;

2)-you import your data within a general purpose package for data analysis (such as MATLAB) and there you find an eneormous quantity of analysis tools that you have to implement by using the lMatlab language (very user friendly and easy to use)

There is a free motion analysis software called Kinovea. I've used it to track cows walking and calculate angles of motion. I was considering buying a commercial package as I was told it would be possible to track movement without the application of targets to the body, however when I tried this on a trial version it wasn't very effective. However as you are recording human movement, applying targets won't be a problem. There is an automatic tracking function in Kinovea and it could be worth trying out before you purchase a commercial package.

At the University of Cordoba, we developed the UCOTrack Motion Analysis System (www.ucotrack.es). It allows to use video from any source (DV cameras, mobile phone, High Speed Cameras, ...). and produces 3D kinematic data. Although it will be commercially availble in the future, we accept beta testers. We used it in measuring spinal mobility in patients, gait analysis, etc. We also used in sport performance and horses. It is easy to use and can work in outdoors. But there is only a Microsoft Windows version :-(

I think you can try Tracker software. It is free and do not require much time to learn how use it. It can auto-track markers position in 2D environment and export position data to excel data or other formats. Unfortunately you cannot synchronize video-data that comes from two or more cameras but you can and audio or video event to overcome this problem. Anyway, the software to use depends on the kind of analysis you have to do.

Use Kinovea, just as Michael Cafferty suggested. It is a free alternative to Dartfish and it allows you to track movements through markers, measure angles and distances, and slow down video to select key images to analyze.

It is not an easy question, since available instruments for 3-D trajectory tracking are usually implemented for whole body movements. I would like to suggest you to ask to some research laboratory with a 3-D tracjectory tracking instrument to apply the instrument to the study of hand-arm movements. Will it work? If yes, please send me some informations on the applied technique ([email protected])

You can check the link below., they are open source software. However, these don't work on Mac, you can try to use them with Virtual PC. Some of the ready to download models can be useful, or you can build it yourself.

https://simtk.org/xml/index.xml

I hope this helps.

If you have already recorded your data and used video to do so, I'd suggest trying MaxTraq from Innovision. You have a free-trial download, and it is relatively inexpensive. Upgrades to 3D are possible, too.

SIMI analysis is a good one, but if you want a cheap solution download a free software from the internet using a 15 days free trial

For 2D analyses using Mac KriMag (http://www.krimagtech.se/) are developing a simple to use product that we tried with some of our students. The homepage is in Swedish but the developers (Krister and Magnus) are very helpful and interested in implementing new functions.

I think kinovea is good

Hi Alex, I saw you are working on stroke and how music and instruments can play a role in that.

There is another way to generate sounds without using trajectories.

I suggest you to follow our crowd funding on a novel way to transform motion into music/sound/instruments. It might be interesting for your research:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/buffo-music-box-1-0#home

Currently we're doing research on tracking hand and fingers kinematics using inertial and magnetic sensors: http://www.utwente.nl/ewi/bss/research/research_themes/meso/project_powersensor/

Optotrak and Caren ... Very reliable and widely used in the universities of Montreal. It is not cheap and there are other options but those are the ones I am familiar with.

Hi Alex,

We use the Optotrak camera system for tracking motion in 3D space. You can use OpenSim for software. I believe this is freeware.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Danè

What about the open source Tracker analysis video: https://www.cabrillo.edu/~dbrown/tracker/ ??

Contemplas is not very good for your analysis.

A very easy solution is the simi motion analysis system. It can calculate the angles and veg without tracking the markers. Try it 

You could have a demo to check your experiment

Contemplas is good for gait analysis but not for movement like sport. You can use different kind HS cameras and get data in kinovea or similar softwares.

Polhemus Liberty http://polhemus.com/motion-tracking/all-trackers/liberty/ with microsesnors http://polhemus.com/micro-sensors/ will the best solution for such application. Refer http://polhemus.com/case-study/detail/development-of-a-motion-capture-system-for-a-hand-using-a-magnetic-three-di. No line-of-sight restriction, no drift, 6DOF data with high position and orientation accuracy @ 240Hz per sensor with least latency available in the market, 3.5 milisec. Metals in the vicinity are the problem though. Those should be avoided nearby the experiment site.

Kinovea: http://www.kinovea.org

Video tracker analysis: http://physlets.org/tracker/

Hello,

If you have already the data, you can use Mokka (https://biomechanical-toolkit.github.io/mokka/index.html) to visualise your data and BTK (https://github.com/Biomechanical-ToolKit) to process your data with Matlab or Python. Both are OpenSource and free.

Best Regards

Stéphane

Hi Redha,

I would suggest http://www.kinovea.org if it is not good for you we can find another one.

Greeting from Austria

Amr

Kinovea for starting is the best free option!