Department of Mechanical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, via Privata Giuseppe La Masa 1, 20156 Milan, Italy.
Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 Milan, Italy.
Sensors (Basel). 2023 Jun 3;23(11):5309. doi: 10.3390/s23115309.
Measurement of reaction time in clinical settings is generally employed to assess cognitive abilities by having a subject perform standard simple tests. In this study, a new method of measuring response time (RT) was developed using a system composed of LEDs that emit light stimuli and are equipped with proximity sensors. The RT is measured as the time taken by the subject to turn off the LED target by moving the hand towards the sensor. Through an optoelectronic passive marker system, the associated motion response is assessed. Two tasks of 10 stimuli each were defined: simple reaction time and recognition reaction time tasks. To validate the method implemented to measure RTs, the reproducibility and repeatability of the measurements were estimated, and, to test the method's applicability, a pilot study was conducted on 10 healthy subjects (6 females and 4 males, age = 25 ± 2 years), reporting, as expected, that the response time was affected by the task's difficulty. Unlike commonly used tests, the developed method has proven to be adequate for the simultaneous evaluation of the response in terms of time and motion. Furthermore, thanks to the playful nature of the tests, this method could also be used for clinical and pediatric applications to measure the impact of motor and cognitive impairments on RT.
在临床环境中，通常采用测量反应时间的方法来评估认知能力，让受试者进行标准的简单测试。在这项研究中，开发了一种使用由发出光刺激并配备接近传感器的 LED 组成的系统来测量反应时间 (RT) 的新方法。RT 是通过受试者将手移向传感器来关闭 LED 目标所花费的时间来测量的。通过光电无源标记系统评估相关的运动反应。定义了两个各包含 10 个刺激的任务：简单反应时间任务和识别反应时间任务。为了验证实施的 RT 测量方法的有效性，估计了测量的可重复性和可重复性，并且，为了测试方法的适用性，对 10 名健康受试者（6 名女性和 4 名男性，年龄 = 25 ± 2 岁）进行了一项初步研究，正如预期的那样，响应时间受到任务难度的影响。与常用的测试不同，所开发的方法已被证明足以同时评估时间和运动方面的响应。此外，由于测试具有趣味性，因此该方法也可用于临床和儿科应用，以测量运动和认知障碍对 RT 的影响。
