Assessment of motor skill task performance with a task progress-weighted error measure

A quantitative measure has been developed for the assessment and skill ordering of target-cued motor control and coordination task performances. It is similar to the classical root mean square error (RMSE) measure but modified with task progress weighting that attenuates with target proximity to its destination and amplifies as data sampling occurrences accumulate prior to task completion. The measure has the same mathematical form whether the task design is of the tracing type or of the tracking type, and thus can be used in cross task type comparisons. The new measure is applied to a few simple hypothetical task performances in order to illustrate some of its properties, and then applied to actual experimental data from a tracing task and a tracking task to demonstrate its use.