An fMRI-Compatible System for 3DOF Motion Tracking of Objects in Haptic Motor Control Studies

Fusing naturalistic motor psychophysics with neuroimaging remains a key challenge in neuroscience, given that the former requires advanced motion tracking and the latter commonly entails certain technical compatibility constrains. Here we designed and developed fMOVE, a novel 3DOF fMRI-compatible motion tracking system to support realistic object manipulation (haptic) tasks during a neuroimaging session. fMOVE constitutes an ultra-low-cost technology, based on a standardized zoom-lens camera and ARToolkit, a software library for augmented reality applications. Motion tracking occurs with a 120 Hz frequency, that lies within the range of established fMRI-incompatible motion tracking methods. It captures the real-time movement of a marked hand-held object and provides online feedback of motor performance to subjects, thereby enabling closed-loop motor control and learning experiments. Tracking accuracy was tested against the performance levels of a commercial electromagnetic motion tracker. fMOVE thus constitutes a promising methodological platform to pursue the real-time, closed-loop study of motor behavior in real-world tasks and decipher its underlying neural mechanisms.