Closed-Loop Task Difficulty Adaptation during Virtual Reality Reach-to-Grasp Training Assisted with an Exoskeleton for Stroke Rehabilitation

Someone here should have written a stroke protocol out of this so it could be critiqued and updated as needed. But without that this is pretty much fucking useless research
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnins.2016.00518/full?

Florian Grimm, Georgios Naros and Alireza Gharabaghi^*

• Division of Functional and Restorative Neurosurgery, and Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Eberhard Karls University of Tuebingen, Tuebingen, Germany

Stroke patients with severe motor deficits of the upper extremity may practice rehabilitation exercises with the assistance of a multi-joint exoskeleton. Although this technology enables intensive task-oriented training, it may also lead to slacking when the assistance is too supportive. Preserving the engagement of the patients while providing “assistance-as-needed” during the exercises, therefore remains an ongoing challenge. We applied a commercially available seven degree-of-freedom arm exoskeleton to provide passive gravity compensation during task-oriented training in a virtual environment. During this 4-week pilot study, five severely affected chronic stroke patients performed reach-to-grasp exercises resembling activities of daily living. The subjects received virtual reality feedback from their three-dimensional movements. The level of difficulty for the exercise was adjusted by a performance-dependent real-time adaptation algorithm. The goal of this algorithm was the automated improvement of the range of motion. In the course of 20 training and feedback sessions, this unsupervised adaptive training concept led to a progressive increase of the virtual training space (p < 0.001) in accordance with the subjects' abilities. This learning curve was paralleled by a concurrent improvement of real world kinematic parameters, i.e., range of motion (p = 0.008), accuracy of movement (p = 0.01), and movement velocity (p < 0.001). Notably, these kinematic gains were paralleled by motor improvements such as increased elbow movement (p = 0.001), grip force (p < 0.001), and upper extremity Fugl-Meyer-Assessment score from 14.3 ± 5 to 16.9 ± 6.1 (p = 0.026). Combining gravity-compensating assistance with adaptive closed-loop feedback in virtual reality provides customized rehabilitation environments for severely affected stroke patients. This approach may facilitate motor learning by progressively challenging the subject in accordance with the individual capacity for functional restoration. It might be necessary to apply concurrent restorative interventions to translate these improvements into relevant functional gains of severely motor impaired patients in activities of daily living.

Introduction

Despite their participation in standard rehabilitation programs (Jørgensen et al., 1999; Dobkin, 2005), restoration of arm and hand function for activities of daily living is not achieved in the majority of stroke patients. In the first weeks and months after stroke, a positive relationship between the dose of therapy and clinically meaningful improvements has been demonstrated (Lohse et al., 2014; Pollock et al., 2014). In stroke patients with long-standing (>6 months) upper limb paresis, however, treatment effects were small, with no evidence of a dose-response effect of task-specific training on the functional capacity (Lang et al., 2016). This has implications for the use of assistive technologies such as robot-assisted training during stroke rehabilitation. These devices are usually applied to further increase and standardize the amount of therapy. They have the potential to improve arm/hand function and muscle strength, albeit currently available clinical trials provide on the whole only low-quality evidence (Mehrholz et al., 2015). It has, notably, been suggested that technology-assisted improvements during stroke rehabilitation might at least partially be due to unspecific influences such as increased enthusiasm for novel interventions on the part of both patients and therapists (Kwakkel and Meskers, 2014). In particular, a comparison between robot-assisted training and dose-matched conventional physiotherapy in controlled trials revealed no additional, clinically relevant benefits (Lo et al., 2010; Klamroth-Marganska et al., 2014). This might be related to saturation effects. Alternatively, the active robotic assistance might be too supportive when providing “assistance-as-needed” during the exercises (Chase, 2014). More targeted assistance might therefore be necessary during these rehabilitation exercises to maintain engagement without compromising the patients' motivation; i.e., by providing only as much support as necessary and as little as possible (Grimm and Gharabaghi, 2016). In this context, passive gravity compensation with a multi-joint arm exoskeleton may be a viable alternative to active robotic assistance (Housman et al., 2009; Grimm et al., 2016a). In severely affected patients, performance-dependent, neuromuscular electrical stimulation of individual upper limb muscles integrated in the exoskeleton may increase the range of motion even further (Grimm and Gharabaghi, 2016; Grimm et al., 2016b). These approaches focus on the improvement of motor control, which is defined as the ability to make accurate and precise goal-directed movements without reducing movement speed (Reis et al., 2009; Shmuelof et al., 2012), or using compensatory movements (Kitago et al., 2013, 2015). Functional gains in hemiparetic patients, however, are often achieved by movements that aim to compensate the diminished range of motion of the affected limb (Cirstea and Levin, 2000; Grimm et al., 2016a). Although these compensatory strategies might be efficient in short-term task accomplishment, they may lead to long-term complications such as pain and joint-contracture (Cirstea and Levin, 2007; Grimm et al., 2016a). In this context, providing detailed information about how the movement is carried out, i.e., the quality of the movement, is more likely to recover natural movement patterns and avoid compensatory movements, than to provide information about movement outcome only (Cirstea et al., 2006; Cirstea and Levin, 2007; Grimm et al., 2016a). This feedback, however, needs to be provided implicitly, since explicit information has been shown to disrupt motor learning in stroke patients (Boyd and Winstein, 2004, 2006; Cirstea and Levin, 2007). Information on movement quality has therefore been incorporated as implicit closed-loop feedback in the virtual environment of an exoskeleton-based rehabilitation device (Grimm et al., 2016a). Specifically, the continuous visual feedback of the whole arm kinematics allowed the patients to adjust their movement quality online during each task; an approach closely resembling natural motor learning (Grimm et al., 2016a).

Along these lines, virtual reality and interactive video gaming have emerged as treatment approaches in stroke rehabilitation (Laver et al., 2015). They have been used as an adjunct to conventional care (to increase overall therapy time) or compared with the same dose of conventional therapy. These studies have demonstrated benefits in improving upper limb function and activities of daily living, albeit currently available clinical trials tend to provide only low-quality evidence (Laver et al., 2015). Most of these studies were conducted with mildly to moderately affected patients. In the remaining patient group with moderate to severe upper limp impairment, the intervention effects were more heterogeneous and affected by the impairment level, with either no or only modest additional gains in comparison to dose-matched conventional treatments (Housman et al., 2009; Byl et al., 2013; Subramanian et al., 2013).

With respect to the restoration of arm and hand function in severely affected stroke patients in particular, there is still a lack of evidence for additional benefits from technology-assisted interventions for activities of daily living. The only means of providing such evidence is by sufficiently powered, randomized and adequately controlled trials (RCT).

However, such high-quality RCT studies require considerable resources. Pilot data acquired earlier in the course of feasibility studies may provide the rationale and justification for later large-scale RCT. Such studies therefore need to demonstrate significant improvements, with functional relevance for the participating patients. Then again, costly RCT can be avoided when innovative interventions prove to be feasible but not effective with regard to the treatment goal, i.e., that they do not result in functionally relevant upper extremity improvements in severely affected stroke patients.

One recent pilot study, for example, applied brain signals to control an active robotic exoskeleton within the framework of a brain-robot interface (BRI) for stroke rehabilitation. This device provided patient control over the training device via motor imagery-related oscillations of the ipsilesional cortex (Brauchle et al., 2015). The study illustrated that a BRI may successfully link three-dimensional robotic training to the participant's effort. Furthermore, the BRI allowed the severely impaired stroke patients to perform task-oriented activities with a physiologically controlled multi-joint exoskeleton. However, this approach did not result in significant upper limb improvements with functional relevance for the participating patients. This training approach was potentially too challenging and may even have frustrated the patients (Fels et al., 2015). The patients' cognitive resources for coping with the mental load of performing such a neurofeedback task must therefore be taken into consideration (Bauer and Gharabaghi, 2015a; Naros and Gharabaghi, 2015). Mathematical modeling on the basis of Bayesian simulation indicates that this might be achieved when the task difficulty is adapted in the course of the training (Bauer and Gharabaghi, 2015b). Such an adaptation strategy has the potential to facilitate reinforcement learning (Naros et al., 2016b) by progressively challenging the patient (Naros and Gharabaghi, 2015). Recent studies explored automated adaptation of training difficulty in stroke rehabilitation of less severely affected patients (Metzger et al., 2014; Wittmann et al., 2015). More specifically, both robot-assisted rehabilitation of proprioceptive hand function (Metzger et al., 2014) and inertial sensor-based virtual reality feedback of the arm (Wittmann et al., 2015) benefit from assessment-driven adjustments of exercise difficulty. Furthermore, a direct comparison between adaptive BRI training and non-adaptive training (Naros et al., 2016b) or sham adaptation (Bauer et al., 2016a) in healthy patients revealed the impact of reinforcement-based adaptation for the improvement of performance. Moreover, the exercise difficulty has been shown to influence the learning incentive during the training; more specifically, the optimal difficulty level could be determined empirically while disentangling the relative contribution of neurofeedback specificity and sensitivity (Bauer et al., 2016b).

In the present 4-week pilot study, we combined these approaches and customized them for the requirements of patients with severe upper extremity impairment by applying a multi-joint exoskeleton for task-oriented arm and hand training in an adaptive virtual environment. Notably, due to the severity of their impairment, these patients were not able to practice the reach-to-grasp movements without the exoskeleton. The set-up was, however, limited to pure antigravity support, i.e., it provided passive rather than active assistance. Furthermore, it tested the feasibility of closed-loop online adaptation of exercise difficulty and aimed at automated progression of task challenge.