A smartphone application developed by University of California, Davis, and UC Irvine students is poised to change how clinicians assess motor recovery in stroke patients. The Clinical Motor Recovery assessment tool, or C-MoRe, utilizes a smartphone’s camera and machine learning to quantify a patient’s progress during rehabilitation exercises with a reported 100% accuracy in detecting block transfers compared to human observation.
Currently, clinicians largely rely on visual assessment to measure a stroke patient’s ability to move, grasp, and release objects. C-MoRe aims to provide a more precise and efficient method, capturing every motion and offering new insights into the recovery process. The app focuses on the “box and blocks” test, a standardized assessment where patients move blocks between two sections of a partitioned box.
The project was spearheaded by Ziqiang “Joe” Zhu and Jun Min Kim, master’s students in computer science at UC Davis. Their work builds upon the foundation laid by Andria Farrens, a UC Davis graduate in mechanical engineering with a biomedical engineering minor, who initiated the project. Collaboration with UC Irvine’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering within the Samueli School of Engineering was crucial to the app’s development and testing.
Researchers applied C-MoRe to video footage of seven stroke patients performing the Box and Blocks Test. A recent paper published in IEEE Xplore details the app’s ability to not only detect block transfers with complete accuracy but also to quantify various limb functions, including grasp and transfer duration, movement amplitude, and velocity. This detailed data collection could enable physicians to more accurately assess a patient’s recovery and tailor their rehabilitation strategy.
“C-MoRe is two things. One is, let’s make it easier for the clinicians who are actually administering this test by automating parts of it that they can then review,” explained Zhu. The app is intended to assist clinicians, not replace them, by automating portions of the assessment process and providing a detailed record for review.
The development of C-MoRe received recognition at the American Society for Engineering Education Pacific Southwest Section annual conference, where UC Davis faculty and students received four of the five top awards presented.
