In this paper, we propose a system for abnormal motion detection using 3D skeleton information, where the abnormal motion is not known a priori. To that end, we present a curve-based representation of a sequence, based on few joints of a 3D skeleton, and a deformation-based distance function. We further introduce a time-variation model that is specifically designed for assessing the quality of a motion; we refer to a distance function that is based on such a model as motion quality distance. The overall advantages of the proposed approach are 1) lower dimensional yet representative sequence representation and 2) a distance function that emphasizes time variation, the motion quality distance, which is a particularly important property for quality assessment. We validate our approach using a publicly available dataset, SPHERE-StairCase2014 dataset. Qualitative and quantitative results show promising performance.