Cuppone A, Squeri V, Semprini M, Konczak J
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2015;2015:258-61. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2015.7318349.
Proprioception is central for motor control and its role must also be taken into account when designing motor rehabilitation training protocols. This is particularly important when dealing with motor deficits due to proprioceptive impairment such as peripheral sensory neuropathy. In these cases substituting or augmenting diminished proprioceptive sensory information might be beneficial for improving motor function. However it still remains to be understood how proprioceptive senses can be improved by training, how this would translate into motor improvement and whether additional sensory modalities during motor training contribute to the sensorimotor training process. This preliminary study investigated how proprioceptive/haptic training can be augmented by providing additional sensory information in the form of vibro-tactile feedback. We tested the acuity of the wrist proprioceptive position sense before and after robotic training in two groups of healthy subjects, one trained only with haptic feedback and one with haptic and vibro-tactile feedback. We found that only the group receiving the multimodal feedback significantly improved proprioceptive acuity. This study demonstrates that non-proprioceptive position feedback derived from another somatosensory modality is easily interpretable for humans and can contribute to an increased precision of joint position. The clinical implications of this finding will be outlined.
本体感觉对于运动控制至关重要，在设计运动康复训练方案时也必须考虑其作用。在处理因本体感觉受损（如周围感觉神经病变）导致的运动缺陷时，这一点尤为重要。在这些情况下，替代或增强减弱的本体感觉信息可能有助于改善运动功能。然而，目前仍有待了解如何通过训练改善本体感觉，这将如何转化为运动改善，以及运动训练期间的其他感觉模态是否有助于感觉运动训练过程。这项初步研究调查了如何通过提供振动触觉反馈形式的额外感觉信息来增强本体感觉/触觉训练。我们在两组健康受试者中测试了机器人训练前后手腕本体感觉位置觉的敏锐度，一组仅接受触觉反馈训练，另一组接受触觉和振动触觉反馈训练。我们发现，只有接受多模态反馈的组显著提高了本体感觉敏锐度。这项研究表明，源自另一种体感模态的非本体感觉位置反馈对人类来说易于理解，并且可以提高关节位置的精度。将概述这一发现的临床意义。
