A Comparative Analysis of DTW Variants for Kinect-Based Motor Skill Assessment in Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD)

Abstract: Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) assessment traditionally relies on subjective, time-consuming tests. This paper proposes an objective, Kinect-based framework to analyze motor skills in children with DCD. Building on our previous work using a lossless Dominant Range of Movement Index (D-RoMI) representation, this study conducts a comparative analysis of three advanced Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithms: Constrained DTW (cDTW), Derivative DTW (DDTW), and Soft-DTW. We evaluated their ability to classify motor patterns from DCD and typically developing children against "gold-standard" templates. Our findings show that DDTW, which compares movement velocity rather than position, achieves the highest classification accuracy. This suggests that analyzing movement dynamics is more informative for identifying DCD's characteristic motor patterns than spatial analysis alone. This framework offers a more reliable and efficient pathway for DCD assessment.

Keywords: Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), Derivative DTW (DDTW), Motion Analysis, Kinect.