Motor Skill Assessment in Developmental Disorders

The accurate appraisal of motor skills is fundamental to understanding and supporting children with developmental disorders. Motor competence encompasses both gross skills—such as balance, locomotion and object control—and fine skills, including manual dexterity and visuomotor integration. In conditions such as developmental coordination disorder and autism spectrum disorder, delays or atypical patterns of motor development can impede daily activities, academic performance and social participation. Assessment approaches range from standardised observational batteries to advanced quantitative systems that capture temporal and kinematic details. Early identification of motor deficits enables targeted interventions, optimises long-term outcomes and informs the design of adaptive educational and rehabilitative programmes. Across diverse settings, researchers and clinicians emphasise the need for reliable, valid and feasible tools that balance sensitivity to subtle impairments with practicality for large-scale screening. Recent advances illustrate how process-oriented metrics, normative motor competence data and sensor technologies can be interwoven to deliver a comprehensive picture of motor development, thereby enhancing global efforts to support children at risk of persistent motor challenges.

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Motor Skill Assessment in Developmental Disorders publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in motor skill assessment in developmental disorders across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Fine motor competence: The ability to perform precise movements using small muscles, particularly of the hands and fingers.

Fundamental movement skills (FMS): Basic locomotor, object control and stability actions that form the foundation for complex motor tasks.

Inertial measurement unit (IMU): A wearable sensor that records angular velocity and linear acceleration to characterise movement dynamics.

Motor competence (MC): A latent construct reflecting proficiency across a range of gross and fine motor tasks, often derived from multiple test items.

Process-oriented measures: Quantitative metrics capturing the quality and temporal structure of movement, as opposed to only outcome scores.

References

1. Sensor-Based Quantitative Assessment of Children’s Fine Motor Competence: An Instrumented Version of the Placing Bricks Test. Sensors (2024).
2. The validity and reliability of observational assessment tools available to measure fundamental movement skills in school-age children: A systematic review. PLOS ONE (2020).
3. Validation of a Motor Competence Assessment Tool for Children and Adolescents (KTK3+) With Normative Values for 6- to 19-Year-Olds. Frontiers in Physiology (2021).