In an attempt to objectively represent and differentiate movement techniques, and further understand the variability in human motion behavior, this study presents a quantitative index termed Joint Contribution Vector (JCV) representing a motion in terms of contributions of individual joint degrees-of-freedom to the achievement of the task goal. Given a set of uncharacterized motions, the JCV index and statistical visualization and clustering methods enable identification of alternative movement techniques and graphical representation of motion variability. A motion data analysis was conducted to demonstrate the utility of the JCV index.
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