David Ann, Subash Tanya, Varadhan S K M, Melendez-Calderon Alejandro, Balasubramanian Sivakumar
Department of Applied Mechanics, Indian Institute of Technology - Madras, Chennai, India.
Department of Bioengineering, Christian Medical College, Vellore, India.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2021 Jul 22;15:667509. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2021.667509. eCollection 2021.
The ultimate goal of any upper-limb neurorehabilitation procedure is to improve upper-limb functioning in daily life. While clinic-based assessments provide an assessment of what a patient can do, they do not completely reflect what a patient does in his/her daily life. The use of compensatory strategies such as the use of the less affected upper-limb or excessive use of trunk in daily life is a common behavioral pattern seen in patients with hemiparesis. To this end, there has been an increasing interest in the use of wearable sensors to objectively assess upper-limb functioning. This paper presents a framework for assessing upper-limb functioning using sensors by providing: (a) a set of definitions of important constructs associated with upper-limb functioning; (b) different visualization methods for evaluating upper-limb functioning; and (c) two new measures for quantifying how much an upper-limb is used and the relative bias in their use. The demonstration of some of these components is presented using data collected from inertial measurement units from a previous study. The proposed framework can help guide the future technical and clinical work in this area to realize valid, objective, and robust tools for assessing upper-limb functioning. This will in turn drive the refinement and standardization of the assessment of upper-limb functioning.
任何上肢神经康复程序的最终目标都是改善患者在日常生活中的上肢功能。虽然基于诊所的评估能够对患者的能力进行评估,但并不能完全反映患者在日常生活中的实际行为。在日常生活中使用代偿策略,如使用受影响较小的上肢或过度使用躯干,是偏瘫患者常见的行为模式。为此,人们对使用可穿戴传感器来客观评估上肢功能的兴趣与日俱增。本文通过提供以下内容,提出了一个使用传感器评估上肢功能的框架:(a) 一组与上肢功能相关的重要概念的定义;(b) 用于评估上肢功能的不同可视化方法;(c) 两种新的测量方法,用于量化上肢的使用程度及其使用中的相对偏差。使用先前研究中从惯性测量单元收集的数据展示了其中一些组件。所提出的框架有助于指导该领域未来的技术和临床工作,以实现用于评估上肢功能的有效、客观和可靠的工具。这反过来又将推动上肢功能评估的完善和标准化。