Subproject D01

Hand Motion Patterns Derived from Empatho-Kinaesthetic Sensor Data as a Diagnostic Parameter for Disease Activity in Patients with Rheumatic Diseases

D01 is a team of rheumatologists and movement scientists that are investigating on objective monitoring of function in patients with auto-inflammatory rheumatic diseases with the overall aim to support disease monitoring to enable a timely and optimal medical treatment. To better understand how these diseases affect the movement of the hands, they measured grip strength and fine motor skills in patients and healthy individuals and used a state-of-the-art marker-based motion capture technology to analyze a set of different hand movement tasks. Comparing these functional outcomes with clinical parameters D01 will follow a holistic approach to objectively assess muscle and skeletal function in relation to disease activity.

D01 collected data under standardized conditions on the current disease status of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and psoriatic arthritis (PsA), in combination with a comprehensive clinical test battery of hand function as well as comparative data from a healthy cohort. The analysis will focus on the interaction of the functional movement data with clinical scores like the grade of synovitis and tenosynovitis detected by ultrasonography and clinical disease activity scores. Previous results highlighted sex- and age-based differences in functional tasks. Therefore ongoing analysis will focus on classifying objective biomarkers based on these groups and within the two different condition of RA and PsA to find the best suited parameters for objective functional monitoring.

EmpkinS technologies will enable the unconfined assessment of hand function in the clinical routine and daily life with the goal of monitoring disease activity with objective biomarkers of hand movement.