Motor Recovery of the Ipsilesional Upper Limb in Subacute Stroke

Impacts of Sensation, Perception, and Motor Abilities of the Ipsilesional Upper Limb on Hand Functions in Unilateral Stroke: Quantifications From Biomechanical and Functional Perspectives

“…Similar to the findings of a recent study [22], the ipsilesional hands of stroke patients in the current work took a longer time to complete the task, and had lower peak velocity in both the transport and reach movements than the healthy controls. This could be explained by the fact that stroke patients pay more attention when preparing to carry out a functional task [9,22] and reduce the force generation produced to control a movement [45].…”

“…As clinical hand function tests sometimes lack sufficient sensitivity to detect subtle changes in UE motor function [22,43], the parameters from the kinematic analysis have been considered to be more accurate to quantify movements of ipsilesional extremities, and have been reported to correlate strongly with clinical assessments [44‐46]. Similar to the findings of a recent study [22], the ipsilesional hands of stroke patients in the current work took a longer time to complete the task, and had lower peak velocity in both the transport and reach movements than the healthy controls. This could be explained by the fact that stroke patients pay more attention when preparing to carry out a functional task [9,22] and reduce the force generation produced to control a movement [45].…”

“…The analysis of functional performance is highly reliant on the temporal and spatial interaction of the upper extremities. Most related studies have evaluated kinematic parameters to represent the degree of motor coordination in the ipsilesional limbs of stroke patients [9,22], but few have analyzed the kinetic factors when executing a functional task. In recent years, researchers have started to examine the dynamics of pinch performance as an experimental model to investigate sensorimotor control of the hand [23].…”

Constraint-induced movement therapy after stroke

“…(94, 95) These improvements in intra-limb coordination are accompanied by a significant reduction in patients' variability(94) and improvement in the smoothness(95) of their motor performance. Interestingly, the 3D-kinematic improvements closely follow the clinical time course of impairments such as synergism(94, 96, 97) and are also restricted to the first 3 months post stroke. (98, 99) Interestingly, the present meta-analysis further suggests that the effects of mCIMT on motor function of the arm such as FMA-arm scores is restricted to trials that started within this time window of 3 months post stroke (Table 1 and supplementary web appendix 6 and 7) (References (34, 45, 49, 50, 82)).…”

Effects of Vibrotactile Feedback on Human Learning of Arm Motions

“…Although the present study tested college-aged healthy adults, our system is aimed at improving more subtle spatio-temporal deficits of the impaired limb in stroke patients with mild hemiparesis (whose sensory loss is typically very minor) as well as those observed in the less impaired limb, e.g., [43], [44]. …”