Deans' stroke musings: Reorganization of finger coordination patterns through motor exploration in individuals after stroke

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.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Reorganization of finger coordination patterns through motor exploration in individuals after stroke

I have zero individual finger movements and never had any. I haven't seen anything in rehab that might allow me to recover such movement. Especially since I think that that part of the motor cortex is dead.
https://jneuroengrehab.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12984-017-0300-8

Rajiv RanganathanEmail author View ORCID ID profile

Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation201714:90

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12984-017-0300-8

Received: 17 January 2017

Accepted: 30 August 2017

Published: 11 September 2017

Abstract

Background

Impairment of hand and finger function after stroke is common and affects the ability to perform activities of daily living. Even though many of these coordination deficits such as finger individuation have been well characterized, it is critical to understand how stroke survivors learn to explore and reorganize their finger coordination patterns for optimizing rehabilitation. In this study, I examine the use of a body-machine interface to assess how participants explore their movement repertoire, and how this changes with continued practice.

Methods

Ten participants with chronic stroke wore a data glove and the finger joint angles were mapped on to the position of a cursor on a screen. The task of the participants was to move the cursor back and forth between two specified targets on a screen. Critically, the map between the finger movements and cursor motion was altered so that participants sometimes had to generate coordination patterns that required finger individuation. There were two phases to the experiment – an initial assessment phase on day 1, followed by a learning phase (days 2–5) where participants trained to reorganize their coordination patterns.

Results

Participants showed difficulty in performing tasks which had maps that required finger individuation, and the degree to which they explored their movement repertoire was directly related to clinical tests of hand function. However, over four sessions of practice, participants were able to learn to reorganize their finger movement coordination pattern and improve their performance. Moreover, training also resulted in improvements in movement repertoire outside of the context of the specific task during free exploration.

Conclusions

Stroke survivors show deficits in movement repertoire in their paretic hand, but facilitating movement exploration during training can increase the movement repertoire. This suggests that exploration may be an important element of rehabilitation to regain optimal function.