Non-motorised rehabilitation device for performance assessment in upper limb stroke rehabilitation: A pilot study

Abstract

Stroke patients with upper limb disability restricted to carry out their activities of daily living. The patient needs a motivation to recover from a stroke and the patient also needs to go through a rehabilitation process at the same time. The conventional rehabilitation process scoring systems are always subjective, lack reliability and relies heavily on the ability of the trained physiotherapist that providing only rough estimates on motor function. On the other hand, robot-based assessments are objective, repeatable, and could potentially reduce the assessment time. Therefore, a simple non-motorized device was developed as a tool to objectively assess hand function of stroke patients. This study was carried out to investigate the suitability of using the developed device with stroke patient populations and to evaluate the performance of clinical scores prediction of the stroke patients. A total of five patients with upper limb disability following stroke consented to take part in this study. Twelve predictive variables were investigated, relating to the total movement time, velocity, strategy, accuracy, and smoothness from three robotic assessment modules which are Draw I, Draw Diamond and Draw Circle. The hardware for measuring elbow angle has been developed to measure the shoulder movement performed by patient during the assessment process. In addition to that, the shoulder movement calculation method has been proposed and validated. The findings indicate that the performance of prediction for all assessment modules has been increased after implementing the shoulder movement calculation. It is recommended this calculation method to be used in conjunction with kinematic variables to carry out the data acquisition process in the future for improvement of effectiveness and accuracy of the robotic assessment.