Driving-inspired motor-skill assessment system

A full measurement-and-analysis stack for quantifying a learned motor skill and its decline under amyloid-β pathology.

Stage: active

This is my PhD project: an end-to-end system for measuring a learned motor skill and how it changes under amyloid-β pathology — built from the sensor up.

What it involves

  • Custom behavioral apparatus — a driving-inspired task with the instrumentation designed and built for the study.
  • Timestamped acquisition — tactile and contact-sensor data captured at roughly 3.6 Hz, alongside 60 fps video.
  • Markerless kinematics — pose estimation from the video using DeepLabCut, so movement is quantified without physical markers.
  • A reproducible Python pipeline — linear mixed-effects models of the movement trajectories, Mann–Whitney effect sizes, and subject-level aggregation, with explicit data-retention and quality-control reporting across an 84-trial dataset.

Status

The manuscript is in preparation. The analysis code will be released as open source once the work is published — it is not public yet, and this page will link to it when it is.