Low-Cost Tracking Systems Allow Fine Biomechanical Evaluation of Upper-Limb Daily-Life Gestures in Healthy People and Post-Stroke Patients

Abstract

Since the release of the first Kinect in 2011, low-cost technologies for upper-limb evaluation has been employed frequently for rehabilitation purposes. However, a limited number of studies have assessed the potential of the Kinect V2 for motor evaluations. In this paper, a simple biomechanical protocol has been developed, in order to assess the performances of healthy people and patients, during daily-life reaching movements, with focus on some of the patients’ common compensatory strategies. The assessment considers shoulder range of motion, elbow range of motion, trunk compensatory strategies, and movement smoothness. Seventy-seven healthy people and twenty post-stroke patients participated to test the biomechanical assessment. The testing protocol included four different experimental conditions: (1) dominant limb and (2) non-dominant limb of 77 healthy people, and (3) the more impaired limb of 20 post-stroke hemiparetic patients, and (4) the less-impaired limb of 11 patients (subgroup of the original 20). Biomechanical performances of the four groups were compared. Results showed that the dominant and non-dominant limbs of healthy people had comparable performances (p > 0.05). On the contrary, condition (3) showed statistically significant differences between the healthy dominant/non-dominant limb and the less-affected limb in hemiparetic patients, for all parameters of assessment (p < 0.001). In some cases, the less-affected limb of the patients also showed statistical differences (p < 0.05), with respect to the healthy people. Such results suggest that Kinect V2 has the potential for being employed at home, laboratory or clinical environment, for the evaluation of patients’ motor performances.

A Comprehensive Spatial Mapping of Muscle Synergies in Highly Variable Upper-Limb Movements of Healthy Subjects

“…Furthermore, the kinematics of the upper-limb was computed in intrinsic articular coordinates. Three relevant angles were considered: shoulder flexion, shoulder vertical rotation, and elbow flexion, according to the protocol proposed in a previous study (Scano et al, 2019). Then, in order to compare the data, all the movements were aligned by considering the EMGs in the interval [−0.5; +1.5] seconds with respect to the movement onset.…”

New Rehabilitation Assessment Method of the End-Effector Finger Rehabilitation Robot Based on Multi-Sensor Source

“…This paper selected 20 healthy volunteers (sex ratio 1:1, with ages of 20-50 and body mass index (BMI) of [19][20][21][22][23] to conduct an experiment to analyze the changes in eigenval ues. All volunteers gave their informed consent for inclusion before starting the experi ment.…”

“…However, the assessment system has a small number of test patients and needs to be further improved for clinical practice. Antonella [21] proposed a multi-parameter method to evaluate the rehabilitation of patients, including sEMG, electroencephalogram (EEG), kinematics, and clinical scale. This multisource method can better characterize the rehabilitation of patients, but it is highly complex and requires the assistance of professionals.…”

Robot-Aided Systems for Improving the Assessment of Upper Limb Spasticity: A Systematic Review

“…Luckily, this relationship has been improved, new adapting tools for each patient have been added and new technologies as virtual reality (VR) have demonstrated their validity [ 73 ]. The device is not alone and additional inputs have been captured from external sensors [ 74 ]. Despite these promising advantages, further work is required to enhance the connection between machine, therapist, and patient.…”