Capturing Social Motor Coordination: A comparison of the Microsoft Kinect, Video-Motion Analysis and the Polhemus Latus Motion Tracking System

Social motor coordination remains a relatively overlooked dimension of social behavior in children with ASD. One reason for the lack of research is that the motion tracking equipment historically used for recording body movements of children during social interaction has been very costly, as well as cumbersome and impractical. Here we examined whether two low-cost motion-tracking options can be employed to investigate social motor coordination in children with ASD. Of particular interest was the degree to which these low-cost methods of motion tracking could be used to capture and index the coordination dynamics that occurred between a child and an experimenter in comparison to a much more expensive, laboratory grade, motion tracking system. Overall, the results found the expensive system to be better than the low-cost methods, but that the latter two are still able to index differences in social motor coordination between typically developing and ASD children.