In-Motion-App for remote General Movement Assessment: a multi-site observational study

Abstract

ObjectivesTo determine whether videos taken by parents of their infants’ spontaneous movements were in accordance with required standards in the In-Motion-App, and whether the videos could be remotely scored by a trained General Movement Assessment (GMA) observer. Additionally, to assess the feasibility of using home-based video recordings for automated tracking of spontaneous movements, and to examine parents’ perceptions and experiences of taking videos in their homes.DesignThe study was a multi-centre prospective observational study.SettingParents/families of high-risk infants in tertiary care follow-up programmes in Norway, Denmark and Belgium.MethodsParents/families were asked to video record their baby in accordance with the In-Motion standards which were based on published GMA criteria and criteria covering lighting and stability of smartphone. Videos were evaluated as GMA ‘scorable’ or ‘non-scorable’ based on predefined criteria. The accuracy of a 7-point body tracker software was compared with manually annotated body key points. Parents were surveyed about the In-Motion-App information and clarity.ParticipantsThe sample comprised 86 parents/families of high-risk infants.ResultsThe 86 parent/families returned 130 videos, and 121 (96%) of them were in accordance with the requirements for GMA assessment. The 7-point body tracker software detected more than 80% of body key point positions correctly. Most families found the instructions for filming their baby easy to follow, and more than 90% reported that they did not become more worried about their child’s development through using the instructions.ConclusionsThis study reveals that a short instructional video enabled parents to video record their infant’s spontaneous movements in compliance with the standards required for remote GMA. Further, an accurate automated body point software detecting infant body landmarks in smartphone videos will facilitate clinical and research use soon. Home-based video recordings could be performed without worrying parents about their child’s development.Trials registration numberNCT03409978.

Video-Based Automatic Baby Motion Analysis for Early Neurological Disorder Diagnosis: State of the Art and Future Directions

“…Infants evaluated as at high-risk of CP, with an age of 12–24 weeks post-term, were examined in [ 69 ]. Parents and families were asked to video-record their baby through the In-Motion-App by a smartphone.…”

Instructional guides for filming infant movements at home are effective for the General Movements Assessment

“…2,3 As an assessment that is evaluated from video recordings, 4 combined with the widespread availability of smartphone technology and reducing costs of electronics, 5 it is now possible to upskill parents/carers to record videos of their infants for clinical assessment. 6 While dedicated apps have been created to assist parents/carers to record and transmit videos, 7,8 much variance in organisational and regional privacy and data storage policy limits the use of a cost-effective one-size-fits-all phone app. General movements (GMs) are endogenous spontaneous movements that can be recognised by trained assessors in infants prior to term up until 4 months' corrected age when they are in an alert and calm state.…”

Towards human-level performance on automatic pose estimation of infant spontaneous movements

“…The dataset emphasizes the heterogeneity in spontaneous movements by including videos from 12 different sites from seven countries across the globe (i.e., Norway, India, USA, Turkey, Belgium, Denmark, and Great Britain). The videos cover different groups of infants (e.g., typically developing infants, preterm infants, and other high-risk infants enrolled in hospital-based follow-up programs), and are recorded either by clinicians in a hospital setup or by parents using a smartphone application at home [10], [11] (see Fig. 1a for examples from the dataset).…”

“…The widespread use of conventional video recordings to capture infant movements has established the need for markerless motion capture, which enables the extraction of movement information in an unobtrusive manner [9]. This provides a lowcost alternative to sensor-based motion capture, which can be performed both at the clinic and at home [10]. Markerless motion capture has the potential to make movement assessments more widely available and promotes worldwide collaboration in analysis of infant movements.…”