title: Kinematic data analysis for post-stroke patients following bilateral versus unilateral rehabilitation with an upper limb wearable robotic system.
abstract: Robot-assisted stroke rehabilitation has become popular as one approach to helping patients recover function post-stroke. Robotic rehabilitation requires four important elements to match the robot to the patient: realistic biomechanical robotic elements, an assistive control scheme enabled through the human-robot interface, a task oriented rehabilitation program based on the principles of plasticity, and objective assessment tools to monitor change. This paper reports on a randomized clinical trial utilizing a complete robot-assisted rehabilitation system for the recovery of upper limb function in patients post-stroke. In this study, a seven degree-of-freedom (DOF) upper limb exoskeleton robot (UL-EXO7) is applied in a rehabilitation clinical trial for patients stable post-stroke (greater than six months). Patients had a Fugl-Meyer Score between 16-39, were mentally alert (> 19 on the VA Mini Mental Status Exam) and were between 27 and 70 years of age. Patients were randomly assigned to three groups: bilateral robotic training, unilateral robotic training, and usual care. This study is concerned with the changes in kinematics in the two robotic groups. Both patient groups played eight therapeutic video games over 12 sessions (90 min, two times a week). In each session, patients intensively played the different combination of video games that directly interacted with UL-EXO7 under the supervision of research assistant. At each session, all of the joint angle data was recorded for the evaluation of therapeutic effects. A new assessment metric is reported along with conventional metrics. The experimental result shows that both groups of patients showed consistent improvement with respect to the proposed and conventional metrics.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA. hyunchul@soe.ucsc.edu
authors.forename: Hyunchul
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Levi Makaio
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.forename: Irina
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Fedulow
authors.forename: Matt
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Simkins
authors.forename: Gary M
authors.initials: GM
authors.lastname: Abrams
authors.forename: Nancy
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Byl
authors.forename: Jacob
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rosen
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001132:Arm; D001186:Artificial Limbs; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D004867:Equipment Design; D019544:Equipment Failure Analysis; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D016059:Range of Motion, Articular; D012371:Robotics / Q000295:instrumentation*; D020521:Stroke / Q000503:physiopathology*; D000071939:Stroke Rehabilitation; D013813:Therapy, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation*; D016896:Treatment Outcome