P0071 - Does Supine Lying Center of Pressure Movement Predict Normal Developmental Stages in Early Infancy?

Background: Qualitative evaluation of spontaneous movements is often utilized to predict neurodevelopmental impairments in young infants. One such tool is Prechtl's General Movement Assessment (GMA), which has been established as a predictor of cerebral palsy (CP) diagnoses. The GMA is a qualitative clinical tool to visually identify infants with absent or abnormal fidgety movements associated with developmental stage, yet no quantitative measures exist to detect fidgety activity. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine whether a correlation exists between quantitative Center of Pressure (CoP) measurements during supine lying and age.

Methods: Twenty-four healthy full-term infants participated in the IRB-approved study. Infants were placed supine on an AMTI force plate (1000 Hz) in orthogonal view of a GoPro camera and data was collected for 2 minutes (Figure 1). Spontaneous movements were evaluated by three trained raters (TJ, NK, and BM) using GMA. Infants with any discrepancies on the GMA scoring between the three raters were considered as abnormal fidgety. Nineteen infants (adjusted age: 14.7±4.5 weeks; 9M, 10F; length: 59.9±2.7 cm; weight: 6.2±0.8 kg) were deemed fidgety per the GMA and were included in further analyses. Traditional CoP parameters (range, total path length, mean velocity, and mean acceleration of resultant CoP) were assessed, and complexity of each of the resultant CoP variables (location, velocity, and acceleration) was calculated by sample entropy (SampEn). Linear regression with Pearson correlation was performed to assess the correlations between the CoP parameters and adjusted age.

Results: Significant correlations were observed for SampEn of RCoP (r = 0.501, p = 0.027) and range of RCoP (r = 0.609, p = 0.006) with adjusted age (Figure 2). Sample entropy of resultant CoP decreased with increasing age while range of resultant CoP increased with increasing age. In the linear regression model, SampEn of RCoP and range of RCoP were significant predictors, explaining 25% and 37% of the variance in adjusted age, respectively (Figure 2)

Significance: Preliminary findings from this study indicate that quantification of fidgety movements via CoP measurement during supine lying may offer a quick and objective method to identify normal fidgety movements in infants, with the future goal of developing a new diagnostic tool to detect babies at higher risk of neurodevelopmental disorder. Furthermore, this study is the first that we know of to determine a relationship between quantitative CoP measurements of fidgety movement and infant age and thus our results will provide normative data suitable for comparisons with healthy full-term babies and developmentally delayed babies.

Acknowledgements: Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number P20GM125503.