Deans' stroke musings: Supplemental vibrotactile feedback control of stabilization and reaching actions of the arm using limb state and position error encodings

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Supplemental vibrotactile feedback control of stabilization and reaching actions of the arm using limb state and position error encodings

Fairly useless since no stroke protocols were written up. You will have to figure them out yourself.
http://jneuroengrehab.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12984-017-0248-8

Alexis R. Krueger,
Psiche Giannoni,
Valay Shah,
Maura Casadio and
Robert A. ScheidtEmail author View ORCID ID profile

Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation201714:36

DOI: 10.1186/s12984-017-0248-8

Received: 26 May 2016

Accepted: 22 April 2017

Published: 2 May 2017

Abstract

Background

Deficits of kinesthesia (limb position and movement sensation) commonly limit sensorimotor function and its recovery after neuromotor injury. Sensory substitution technologies providing synthetic kinesthetic feedback might re-establish or enhance closed-loop control of goal-directed behaviors in people with impaired kinesthesia.

Methods

As a first step toward this goal, we evaluated the ability of unimpaired people to use vibrotactile sensory substitution to enhance stabilization and reaching tasks. Through two experiments, we compared the objective and subjective utility of two forms of supplemental feedback – limb state information or hand position error – to eliminate hand position drift, which develops naturally during stabilization tasks after removing visual feedback.

Results

Experiment 1 optimized the encoding of limb state feedback; the best form included hand position and velocity information, but was weighted much more heavily toward position feedback. Upon comparing optimal limb state feedback vs. hand position error feedback in Experiment 2, we found both encoding schemes capable of enhancing stabilization and reach performance in the absence of vision. However, error encoding yielded superior outcomes - objective and subjective - due to the additional task-relevant information it contains.

Conclusions

The results of this study have established the immediate utility and relative merits of two forms of vibrotactile kinesthetic feedback in enhancing stabilization and reaching actions performed with the arm and hand in neurotypical people. These findings can guide future development of vibrotactile sensory substitution technologies for improving sensorimotor function after neuromotor injury in survivors who retain motor capacity, but lack proprioceptive integrity in their more affected arm.