There is a group of children who, to the casual observer, appear happy, smart, outgoing, healthy and well-adjusted. But throw them a ball and watch them flinch, fumble and flush.
"These kids are normal in every way except they're clumsy - actually, they're something that is a bit more than clumsy," says Dr. Kelvin Jones, a new professor in the University of Alberta Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation.
In recent years, researchers and clinicians have used behavioural analysis to diagnose these children as having a new category of condition: Developmental Co-ordination Disorder (DCD).
"Typically, kids with DCD want to participate, but if they don't sit out they'll be the last ones picked for the team, and they know they'll probably embarrass themselves, so they withdraw," says Jones.
"If they don't get help they'll likely disengage in sport and physical activity throughout their lives and become at risk for all those bad, unhealthy things associated with a sedentary lifestyle, including the psychological effects, like feeling isolated," he adds.
The difficulty in "getting help" for these children is that no one knows what causes the dysfunction. There are interventions that can improve the co-ordination and confidence of some of these children, but no one understands the physiological basis of the trouble.
However, Jones, a computational neuroscientist who arrived at his current post after spending five years teaching and researching in the University of Alberta?s Department of Biomedical Engineering in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, is in a unique position to help.
Jones has developed a space-aged piece of equipment that can measure a person's sensory response to a variety of complex hand-eye co-ordination tests. By combining a Flostation? with a Phantom? haptic device and a suite of instruments for measuring movement and the activity of nerve and muscle tissue, the tool creates virtual reality environments that simulate what it would feel like to, for example, move through syrup or walk on the moon.
The one-of-a-kind device, which cost more than $125,000 to build, looks like a lounge chair with a giant hair dryer and a 'robotic' joystick attached. Jones created it with a virtual reality specialist in the United States, who initially developed the technology to help train NASA astronauts.
Jones has used his Flostation? to 'eavesdrop' on the signals that the nerves and muscles of healthy adults send to their brains as they learn how to move in new environments. He has used the data from these and other experiments to conduct thousands of computer simulations and make many advances in the field of proprioception, which refers to how the brain interprets movement.
He now plans to take the Flostation? to The TheSteadward Centre for Personal and Physical Achievement, a disability research facility at the University of Alberta, where he will work with children enrolled in the CAGE program (Centre for Adapted Group and Individual Exercise) which is specifically designed to help them deal with motor co-ordination challenges. CAGE programs cater to children and youths with motor delays and disabilities such as DCD, cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy. To begin, Jones will focus on children with DCD.
"The intriguing thing about children with DCD is that they are so close to being normal, they are just one step away," says Jones.. "If we take everything we know about the neuromuscular system in healthy adults and focus on children with DCD, maybe we can find the organic root of the problem."
But Jones won't be satisfied with finding basic, scientific answers?he wants to apply what he learns to find better ways to diagnose these children and help them overcome their disabilities.
"When you see someone walking with a sprained ankle, you notice immediately that they are walking differently, and you know there is an issue there. For kids with DCD everything can look normal but in some motor skills they appear to have a ?limp?. And you can't get a blood or urine sample from them to figure out what's wrong," he emphasizes.
"We know kids with DCD aren't all the same, but we don't know how to distinguish between them. So we want to develop objective tests to complement and extend the behavioural analysis in order to isolate the problem, and once we do that we can figure out what interventions may work best for each child," he adds.
Jones currently receives funding for his research from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research.
"I'm really looking forward to getting started on this," Jones says. "It's work that hasn't been done before, and I'm very optimistic we can learn a lot. And it's going to be fun, because kids are fun."