“Upperlimb” is an application focused on upper extremity motion analysis, based on measurement data collected from optical marker tracking systems.

It has been created for quick and easy processing of three-dimensional upper limb movement data and is offered as a graphical user interface to ensure maximum applicability in medical practice and research.

The application includes advanced algorithms for joint center- and axes estimation, based on functional methods. The results of the data processing can be visualized as 3D stick figure motion and time series plots. It also integrates a motion analysis data mining tool to collect frame based parameters from the time series and it allows to export this data for external processing, e.g. by spreadsheet programs (Excel or Open/Libre-Office).

Upperlimb is a highly configurable software tool that allows to:

• anatomical landmark reconstruction and process joint kinematics
• split the captured motion data into motion cycles based on a free configurable event scheme
• determine spatiotemporal parameters for every motion cycle
• export data in different formats (d3d, MAT, PDF, CSV, XML, gla, glx)
• create reference data files from processed data

The original application Version 1.0 has been developed from the company ORAT Software-Entwicklung <http://www.orat.de> in the year 2009 to simplify and standardize research projects from medical students in the Gait- and Motionlab at Heidelberg University clinics Gaitlab Heidelberg. It fullfills the specific needs of this gaitlab only.

“Upperlimb 1.0” was the first application based on the Nimue platform <http://nimue-platform.motion-science.org/doku.php> - a high configurable set of modules to build up motion analysis applications. It includes a big set of commercial modules, which prohibits that the application can be made available open source as a whole.

With the growing number of PD students working with this software and with the growing number of publications based on its calculations the idea comes up to implement a “Version 2 Upperlimb software” and to make it commonly available. The development of this software is not yet financed. The complete work is done driven by personal interest of Dr. Oliver Rettig. A Version with beta status should be reached up to the end of 2016. The plan is to find a funding to build a version open sourced as a whole.