A HIGH-PRECISION, LOW COST SYSTEM FOR EVALUATING FINGER-TAPPING TASKS

Abstract

Finger-tapping test is extensively employed to assess motor asymmetry in brain damaged patients and also to study the relationship between handedness and performance in normal subjects. The aim of this study was to develop a computer based finger-tapping system that could provide quantitative measures of finger-tapping performance. The system is designed to be used in a standard personel computer without the need of any other hardware. The software is written in Borland Delphi^® 6.0 for Microsoft^® Windows 98^® and higher operating systems. Beginning with the Pentium^® processor, it could be possible to access a time-stamp counter. The time-stamp counter is a 64-bit machine specific register that is incremented by every clock cycle, and keeps an accurate count of every cycle that occurs on the processor. By using a computer with 1 GHz processor speed it is possible to reach a high precision time resolution of 1 μs in finger-tapping tests. Our future prospects for the system are to improve it with various tools such as synchronized recording of electromyography, tapping force monitoring, monitoring of finger angle, and the response to different stimulus parameters by adding appropriate hardware and procedure.

Keywords:

• finger-tapping
• handedness
• method
• performance
• software