Social motor coordination remains a relatively overlooked
dimension of social behavior in children with ASD. One
reason for the lack of research is that the motion tracking
equipment historically used for recording body movements of
children during social interaction has been very costly, as well
as cumbersome and impractical. Here we examined whether
two low-cost motion-tracking options can be employed to
investigate social motor coordination in children with ASD.
Of particular interest was the degree to which these low-cost
methods of motion tracking could be used to capture and
index the coordination dynamics that occurred between a
child and an experimenter in comparison to a much more
expensive, laboratory grade, motion tracking system. Overall,
the results found the expensive system to be better than the
low-cost methods, but that the latter two are still able to index
differences in social motor coordination between typically
developing and ASD children