Deans' stroke musings: On the assessment of coordination between upper extremities: towards a common language between rehabilitation engineers, clinicians and neuroscientists

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.

Friday, September 9, 2016

On the assessment of coordination between upper extremities: towards a common language between rehabilitation engineers, clinicians and neuroscientists

Yet they totally missed having a stroke survivor involved to keep the discussions real.
http://jneuroengrehab.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12984-016-0186-x#Abs1

Camila Shirota,
Jelka Jansa,
Javier Diaz,
Sivakumar Balasubramanian,
Stefano Mazzoleni,
N. Alberto Borghese and
Alejandro Melendez-CalderonEmail author View ORCID ID profile

Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation201613:80

DOI: 10.1186/s12984-016-0186-x

Received: 14 June 2016

Accepted: 24 August 2016

Published: 8 September 2016

Abstract

Well-developed coordination of the upper extremities is critical for function in everyday life. Interlimb coordination is an intuitive, yet subjective concept that refers to spatio-temporal relationships between kinematic, kinetic and physiological variables of two or more limbs executing a motor task with a common goal. While both the clinical and neuroscience communities agree on the relevance of assessing and quantifying interlimb coordination, rehabilitation engineers struggle to translate the knowledge and needs of clinicians and neuroscientists into technological devices for the impaired. The use of ambiguous definitions in the scientific literature, and lack of common agreement on what should be measured, present large barriers to advancements in this area. Here, we present the different definitions and approaches to assess and quantify interlimb coordination in the clinic, in motor control studies, and by state-of-the-art robotic devices. We then propose a taxonomy of interlimb activities and give recommendations for future neuroscience-based robotic- and sensor-based assessments of upper limb function that are applicable to the everyday clinical practice. We believe this is the first step towards our long-term goal of unifying different fields and help the generation of more consistent and effective tools for neurorehabilitation.