Development of a Smart Ball to Evaluate Locomotor Performance: Application in Adolescents with Intellectual Disabilities

Adolescents with intellectual disabilities display maladaptive behaviors in activities of daily living because of physical abnormalities or neurological disorders. These adolescents typically exhibit poor locomotor performance and low cognitive abilities in moving the body to perform tasks (e.g., throwing an object or catching an object) smoothly, quickly, and gracefully when compared with typically developing adolescents. Measuring movement time and distance alone does not provide a complete picture of the atypical performance. In this study, a smart ball with an inertial sensor embedded inside was proposed to measure the locomotor performance of adolescents with intellectual disabilities. Four ball games were designed for use with this smart ball: two lower limb games (dribbling along a straight line and a zigzag line) and two upper limb games (picking up a ball and throwing-and-catching). The results of 25 adolescents with intellectual disabilities (aged 18.36 ± 2.46 years) were compared with the results of 25 typically developing adolescents (aged 18.36 ± 0.49 years) in the four tests. Adolescents with intellectual disabilities exhibited considerable motor-performance differences from typically developing adolescents in terms of moving speed, hand–eye coordination, and object control in all tests.