Psychophysiological Responses to Robotic Rehabilitation Tasks in Stroke

Abstract

This paper presents the analysis of four psychophysiological responses in post-stroke upper extremity rehabilitation. The goal was to determine which psychophysiological responses would provide the most reliable information about subjects' psychological states during rehabilitation. Heart rate, skin conductance, respiration, and skin temperature were recorded in a stroke group and a control group during two difficulty levels of a pick-and-place task performed in a virtual environment using a haptic robot and during a cognitive task. Psychophysiological measurements were correlated with results of a self-report questionnaire. All four responses showed significant changes in response to the different tasks. Skin conductance differentiated between the two difficulty levels and was correlated with self-reported arousal in both stroke and control groups. Skin temperature differentiated between the two difficulty levels for the control group, but provided poor results for the stroke group. Heart rate and respiration increased during tasks, but their connection to psychological state was unclear. Results suggest that, of the four measured responses, skin conductance offers the most potential as a psychological state indicator, with other measures providing supplementary information. Psychophysiological measurements could thus be used in closed-loop biocooperative systems that would detect the user's psychological state and change the course of therapy accordingly.

Metrological traceability of a system for measuring electrodermal activity

“…that were induced by a psychological stimulus (mental and cognitive tasks, physical tasks, psychological tasks, etc.). The relationship between psychophysiological parameters and complexity of the tasks is not always unique and is actually very complex [1][2][3][4], because the physiological response is also subject to large interpersonal differences [5,6].…”

Affective signal processing (ASP) : unraveling the mystery of emotions

“…However, in the field of ASP, we assume the latter instead of the former. Recent application areas include Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) [486,637,683], medical applications (e.g., sedation of patients [249] and rehabilitation [489]), and, as already mentioned, affective loops [83,288,654].…”

“…For example, it has been shown that emotions influence our cardiovascular system [276,400,493,495,496,589,659] and, consequently, can shorten or prolong life [204,205,298,299,423,598]. Moreover, emotions also play an important role with chronic diseases [42,46], cancer (e.g., coping strategies) [343,645], and rehabilitation [489], to mention three. [174, p. vii].…”

Investigating the effect of increasing robot group sizes on the human psychophysiological state in the context of human–swarm interaction

“…Tiberio et al (2012) use psychophysiological measures to study the response to a telepresence robot of elderly people suffering from mild cognitive impairment-a mobile robot mounted with a screen allowing a human to interact with the user via videoconference. Psychophysiological measures have also been used in the context of virtual rehabilitation where stroke patients used a haptic robotic interface that allowed them to feel virtual objects (Goljar et al 2011;Novak et al 2010). For completeness, we also mention other studies we are aware of where psychophysiology has been used in human-robot interaction, even though these studies have very different objectives from our own.…”