Motor Function Assessment of Upper Limb in Stroke Patients

Abstract

Background. Quantitative assessment of motor function is extremely important for poststroke patients as it can be used to develop personalized treatment strategies. This study aimed to propose an evaluation method for upper limb motor function in stroke patients. Methods. Thirty-four stroke survivors and twenty-five age-matched healthy volunteers as the control group were recruited for this study. Inertial sensor data and surface electromyography (sEMG) signals were collected from the upper limb during voluntary upward reaching. Five features included max shoulder joint angle, peak and average speeds, torso balance calculated from inertial sensor data, and muscle synergy similarity extracted from sEMG data by the nonnegative matrix factorization algorithm. Meanwhile, the Fugl–Meyer score of each patient was graded by professional rehabilitation therapist. Results. Statistically significant differences were observed among severe, mild-to-moderate, and control group of five features ( p ≤ 0.001). The features varied as the level of upper limb motor function changes since these features significantly correlated with the Fugl–Meyer assessment scale ( p ≤ 0.001). Moreover, the Bland–Altman method was conducted and showed high consistency between the evaluation method of five features and Fugl–Meyer scale. Therefore, the five features proposed in this paper can quantitatively evaluate the motor function of stroke patients which is very useful in the rehabilitation process.

Upper Limbs Muscle Co-contraction Changes Correlated With the Impairment of the Corticospinal Tract in Stroke Survivors: Preliminary Evidence From Electromyography and Motor-Evoked Potential

“…Previous studies assessed the structural and functional muscle alternation after stroke by ultrasonography ( Kim et al, 2021 ), muscle biopsy ( Dalise et al, 2020 ), sEMG ( Hu et al, 2015 ), high-density-surface (HD-sEMG) ( Tanzarella et al, 2020 ), and dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry ( Choi et al, 2021 ). There are studies that applied sEMG, kinematic parameters, and clinical scales to evaluate the upper-limb motor function in stroke survivors ( Donoso Brown et al, 2014 ; Pan et al, 2021 ). But these studies focused only on the changes in the properties of muscles.…”

Rehabilitation of motor function after stroke: A bibliometric analysis of global research from 2004 to 2022

“… Formstone et al (2021) used a new combination of wearable inertial and mechanical mapping sensors to quantify motor function after stroke, demonstrating that the results of Fugl–Meyer assessment were consistent with those of the mapping sensors. Pan et al (2021) quantitatively assessed motor function in patients with stroke by collecting surface electromyography (sEMG) signals and inertial sensor data during the voluntary upward reach of the upper extremity. As evidenced by new publications in the last 3 years, the Fugl–Meyer scale has been widely used worldwide.…”

Muscle Synergies and Clinical Outcome Measures Describe Different Factors of Upper Limb Motor Function in Stroke Survivors Undergoing Rehabilitation in a Virtual Reality Environment

“…Specifically, they found three muscle synergies that may explain reaching movement. Moreover, severe patients changed one of these muscle synergies; meanwhile, the mild-to-moderate patients were more similar to the control template [ 66 ]. Thus, individualized training may be developed to make the patients’ features more similar to the ones in control subjects so as to improve similarity values (i.e., Median-sp) [ 67 ].…”

“…In our study, our results demonstrate that muscle-synergy parameters showed a potential to contributing to discriminate between patients with different recovery potential: the relationship between neurophysiological parameters (i.e., Median-sp) and clinical variables at the beginning of therapy gave some indication about the potential patient-tailored treatment. More trials will be needed to define the real contribution of muscle-synergy parameters to distinguish between fitters and no-fitters of reactive neurobiological recovery [ 66 , 71 ]. Moreover, we may consider using the similarity parameter (i.e., Median-sp) to build patient-specific prediction models to improve clinical decisions, and, ultimately, recovery and outcome after stroke [ 72 ].…”