Abstract
The hand, one of the most versatile but mechanically redundant parts of the human body, suffers more and longer than other body parts after stroke. One of the rehabilitation paradigms, task-oriented rehabilitation, encourages motor repeatability, the ability to produce similar motor performance over repetitions through compensatory strategies while taking advantage of the motor system’s redundancy. The previous studies showed that stroke survivors inconsistently performed a given motor task with limited motor solutions. We hypothesized that stroke survivors would exhibit deficits in motor repeatability and adaptive compensation compared to healthy controls in during repetitive force-pulse (RFP) production tasks using multiple fingers. Seventeen hemiparetic stroke survivors and seven healthy controls were asked to repeatedly press force sensors as fast as possible using the four fingers of each hand. The hierarchical variability decomposition model was employed to compute motor repeatability and adaptive compensation across finger-force impulses, respectively. Stroke survivors showed decreased repeatability and adaptive compensation of force impulses between individual fingers as compared to the control (p < 0.05). The stroke survivors also showed decreased pulse frequency and greater peak-to-peak time variance than the control (p < 0.05). Force-related variables, such as mean peak force and peak force interval variability, demonstrated no significant difference between groups. Our findings indicate that stroke-induced brain injury negatively affects their ability to exploit their redundant or abundant motor system in an RFP task.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 3543-3552 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Experimental Brain Research |
Volume | 235 |
Issue number | 12 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2017 Dec 1 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Acknowledgements This research was supported in part by grants of (1) the Translational Research Center for Rehabilitation Robots, Korea National Rehabilitation Center, Ministry of Health and Welfare, Korea (NRCTR-EX17009), (2) Korea Health Technology R&D Project through the Korea Health Industry Development Institute (KHIDI) funded by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Republic of Korea (HI14C1155), and (3) Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (R1D1A1A09918167).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany.
Keywords
- Fingers
- Functional capacity impairment
- Nervous system
- Patient outcome assessment
- Psychomotor performance
- Stroke
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Neuroscience