# Utilization of a Mobile Application for Motor Skill Evaluation in Children +
###### Abstract  
The detection of needs in educational reinforcement must be done in the early stages of childhood during primary education to improve the acquisition of motor skills. An adequate early intervention can solve some detected difficulties, thus contributing to children's motor progress and mitigating possible deficiencies such as weak motor coordination. In this work, we present a mobile application (app) that allows physiotherapists to design activities for the evaluation of motor skills. These activities can be adapted to the child's progress and the corresponding reinforcement needs. We tested the app with children from ages 6 to 12, corresponding to the six primary school grades. The results show that these children did not have notable motor difficulties, although children in lower primary school years showed a higher level of error in movement precision. The results allow us to establish reference values for a future comparison with collectives with motor difficulties. data science; engineering development; information systems; mobile app; motor coordination 20 and control skills is needed in the daily relationship between children and the surrounding world [7] and has important implications on different aspects of child and adolescent development [8]. Therefore, an early intervention designed to correct those motor and control difficulties contributing to the child's development is fundamental. Motor and coordination developmental assessment is clinically important in the context of screening, diagnosis and intervention for different reasons [1]. Signs of motor delay or abnormal motor performance in children may indicate a motor disorder or other developmental problems [9; 10]. Developmental coordination disorders (DCD) are characterized by a significant delay in the acquisition of gross and fine motor skills and deterioration in the performance of coordinated motor skills, manifested by clumsiness, slowness or motor inaccuracy [11], but these children are usually not delayed and do not have an easily recognizable neurological disorder [12]. There is a wide and varied range of tools designed for the assessment of motor competence and coordination in children [13]. Since the beginning of the 20 th century, this has been a field of interest due to the high incidence of childhood pathologies that have presented deficits in agility, balance, strength or the combination of complex movements [14]. Although most of those tests have become obsolete, their principles and characteristics have served to lay the basis for subsequent investigations [15]. The use of validated scales like the Movement Assessment Battery for Children 2 (MABC-2) [16] and the McCarron assessment of neuromuscular development (MAND) [17] is useful for the screening and identification of DCD, but in these tools there exists a highly subjective component, which depends on the interpretation of the evaluator and can sometimes generate a bias when detecting minimal errors. In addition, some authors suggest that the \"new fine motor skills\" that children are developing due to the use of touch screen devices [18] are not measured by traditional tests like the the Fine Motor Composite of the Bruininks Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency, 2 nd Edition (BOT-2) [19]. In this way, the relevance of creating computer tools that can report objective information about the precision of the child's movements becomes evident. These tools can be used for the evaluation and for the monitoring of the evolution of visual-motor coordination during any type of training or rehabilitation program that is applied. Therefore, informatics tools to identify and analyze the evolution of motor coordination development in children could be useful for any professional directly involved with children's motor development, such as educational psychologists, physical therapists, occupational therapists and, of course, children themselves [20]. In this work, we present a mobile application (app) for the analysis of fine motor development in children.