Development and validation of data acquisition methods for rehabilitation purposes

Abstract

To further their research into bimanual learning and motor skills, the neurological branch of REVAL, a research group dedicated to rehabilitation and tied to the university of Hasselt, is always in need of the right tools to gather valuable data. This thesis aims to provide some of these tools.

It describes the development of a bimanual tracking task application: its initial goals, the implementation and firmware adaptation of controllers to meet specifications, the conception of a functional graphical user interface which allows for straightforward entry as well as saving and loading of trial parameters and addition to the gathering and exporting of trial data.

The second part discusses the validation of reaction time measurements in an existing serial reaction time task, running in a general purpose operating system. The effects of system parameters on measurements performed by E-Prime, an established data acquisition platform and a self-developed Java AWT implementation are analyzed and compared. In conclusion, an embedded system implementation of the serial reaction time task is proposed and a proof of concept developed.