JRRD	Volume 43, Number 5, Pages 643–656
	August/September 2006

       Journal of Rehabilitation Research & Development

 

Custom-designed haptic training for restoring reaching ability to individuals with poststroke hemiparesis

James L. Patton, PhD;^1–2* Mark Kovic, BS, COTA/L;¹ Ferdinando A. Mussa-Ivaldi, PhD;^1–3

¹Sensory Motor Performance Program, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; ²Departments of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Mechanical Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering and ³Department of Physiology and the Institute for Neuroscience, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL

 

Abstract—We present here an initial test of a new technique for retraining reaching skills of stroke patients, in which errors are temporarily magnified to encourage earning and compensation. Hemiparetic stroke survivors held a horizontal plane manipulandum robot, capable of exerting a variety of forces while recording movement. In this initial study, we measured how well they recovered movement straightness in a single visit to the lab (~ 3 h).  Following training, forces were returned to zero for an additional 50 movements to discern if after-effects lasted.  We found that all subjects showed immediate benefit from the training although three of the ten subjects did not retain these benefits for the remainder of the experiment. We discuss how these approaches demonstrate great potential for rehabilitation tools that augment error in order to facilitate functional recovery.

Key words: adaptation, control, cortex, force fields, haptics, hemiparesis, human, human-machine interface, impairment, lesion, motor learning, rehabilitation, robots, stroke, teaching.

 

Full article