Kinematic measures of Arm-trunk movements during unilateral and bilateral reaching predict clinically important change in perceived arm use in daily activities after intensive stroke rehabilitation

No idea what good this will do for your stroke rehabilitation. Ask your doctor. I hate research that doesn't provide any translational ideas on how this could be used to help stroke survivors recover.
http://www.jneuroengrehab.com/content/12/1/84

Hao-ling Chen¹², Keh-chung Lin¹², Rong-jiuan Liing³, Ching-yi Wu^34* and Chia-ling Chen⁵

• * Corresponding author: Ching-yi Wu cywu@mail.cgu.edu.tw

Author Affiliations

¹ School of Occupational Therapy, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
² Division of Occupational Therapy, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan
³ Department of Occupational Therapy and Graduate Institute of Behavioral Sciences, College of Medicine, Chang Gung University, Taoyuan, Taiwan
⁴ Healthy Ageing Research Center, Chang Gung University, Taoyuan, Taiwan
⁵ Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Taoyuan, Taiwan

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Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation 2015, 12:84  doi:10.1186/s12984-015-0075-8
The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.jneuroengrehab.com/content/12/1/84

Received:	19 January 2015
Accepted:	11 September 2015
Published:	21 September 2015

© 2015 Chen et al.

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Abstract

Background

Kinematic analysis has been used to objectively evaluate movement patterns, quality, and strategies during reaching tasks. However, no study has investigated whether kinematic variables during unilateral and bilateral reaching tasks predict a patient’s perceived arm use during activities of daily living (ADL) after an intensive intervention. Therefore, this study investigated whether kinematic measures during unilateral and bilateral reaching tasks before an intervention can predict clinically meaningful improvement in perceived arm use during ADL after intensive poststroke rehabilitation.

Methods

The study was a secondary analysis of 120 subjects with chronic stroke who received 90–120 min of intensive intervention every weekday for 3–4 weeks. Reaching kinematics during unilateral and bilateral tasks and the Motor Activity Log (MAL) were evaluated before and after the intervention.

Results

Kinematic variables explained 22 and 11 % of the variance in actual amount of use (AOU) and quality of movement (QOM), respectively, of MAL improvement during unilateral reaching tasks. Kinematic variables also explained 21 and 31 % of the variance in MAL-AOU and MAL-QOM, respectively, during bilateral reaching tasks. Selected kinematic variables, including endpoint variables, trunk involvement, and joint recruitment and interjoint coordination, were significant predictors for improvement in perceived arm use during ADL (P < 0.05).

Conclusions

Arm–trunk kinematics may be used to predict clinically meaningful improvement in perceived arm use during ADL after intensive rehabilitation. Involvement of interjoint coordination and trunk control variables as predictors in bilateral reaching models indicates that a high level of motor control (i.e., multijoint coordination) and trunk stability may be important in obtaining treatment gains in arm use, especially for bilateral daily activities, in intensive rehabilitation after stroke.