Cognitive-Motor Interference on Upper Extremity Motor Performance in a Robot-Assisted Planar Reaching Task Among Patients With Stroke.

OBJECTIVE

To explore motor performance on 2 different cognitive tasks during robotic rehabilitation in which motor performance was longitudinally assessed.

DESIGN

Prospective study.

SETTING

Rehabilitation hospital.

PARTICIPANTS

Patients (N=22) with chronic stroke and upper extremity impairment.

INTERVENTION

A total of 640 repetitions of robot-assisted planar reaching, 5 times a week for 4 weeks.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

Longitudinal robotic evaluations regarding motor performance included smoothness, mean velocity, path error, and reach error by the type of cognitive task. Dual-task effects (DTEs) of motor performance were computed to analyze the effect of the cognitive task on dual-task interference.

RESULTS

Cognitive task type influenced smoothness (P=.006), the DTEs of smoothness (P=.002), and the DTEs of reach error (P=.052). Robotic rehabilitation improved smoothness (P=.007) and reach error (P=.078), while stroke severity affected smoothness (P=.01), reach error (P<.001), and path error (P=.01). Robotic rehabilitation or severity did not affect the DTEs of motor performance.

CONCLUSIONS

The results provide evidence for the effect of cognitive-motor interference on upper extremity performance among participants with stroke using a robotic-guided rehabilitation system.