NI\u2019s involvement is part of a multi-faceted, innovative, and groundbreaking study of over 13,000 children and their families called the\u00a0Born in Bradford<\/a>\u00a0study. These children were born in the English city of Bradford at the Bradford Royal Infirmary, between March 2007 and December 2010. In this incredible project, every facet of these children\u2019s health and development is being tracked and evaluated, from within the womb through adulthood.<\/p>\n Included within this scientific study project are efforts to evaluate two critical aspects of a child\u2019s development \u2013 manual dexterity and cognitive capacity. Manual dexterity is the ability to move the hands and fingers in coordinated ways that allow the person to grasp and move objects. Making these movements involves important skeletal, neurological, and muscular functions. Cognitive capacity refers to the amount of information stored and used by the brain at any given moment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Image Credit: Pixabay<\/p>\n Researchers in the Born in Bradford study initially used pencil-and-paper exercises and other time-consuming techniques to gather and evaluate information from children regarding cognitive and dexterity development. As one could well imagine, this made for extremely slow data harvesting that was fraught with user errors. From there, early efforts at adopting more technological solutions involved the use of costly, cumbersome, and hard-to-use lab equipment.<\/p>\n Over time, the study researchers developed a set of basic parameters that any proposed solution must meet in order to serve their needs properly. Some of these were obvious, due to the nature of being used with children aged 4-12: ruggedness, portability, and ease of use were top priorities. Other desires were for the evaluation method or tool to rapidly collect data from a user\u2019s interaction and collate that data seamlessly into a database for later study.<\/p>\n And perhaps most importantly, the researchers desired to have a tool that children would readily engage with, something \u201cfun\u201d as well as useful, that would allow real-time measurements of cognitive function and level of dexterity. A hand-held, digital device with a graphical interface seemed just the right fit. But what functional technology could be used within this tool to produce the results needed?<\/p>\n Study researchers from the University of Leeds, working with\u00a0ReSolve Research Engineering<\/a>, developed and perfected a system they called Kinelab. Kinelab is a program that operates on tablet computers that operates \u201cas a digital equivalent to pen and paper<\/a>.\u201d Using a stylus, a user performs dexterous operations with 2D objects, similar to a video game. The underlying software platform that provides this graphical method of gathering data is NI\u00a0LabVIEW<\/a>, chosen primarily for its core functionality and easy programmability.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.apexwaves.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/brain-2062057_1920.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe Challenge: Better Technology to Harvest Data<\/h1>\n
The Solution: NI LabVIEW and Kinelab<\/h1>\n
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