Micro-movement as an objective measure to assess autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

The assessment of the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has always focused on the observational analysis of behavior, primarily aiming to detect the presence of some behaviors considered typical of the disorder. However, autism is often characterized by motor abnormalities as well. This paper presents a pilot study with the aim to assess the preliminary capability of a software for micro-movement analysis to detect typical characteristics of movement in subjects with ASD. Therefore, the software has been tested on a small sample of ASD subjects and the results have been compared to those of a group of subjects with typical development (TD). The results showed that it is possible to observe some differences between the groups in relation to some parameters of effectiveness, linearity, and average speed of trajectories.