Novel Assessment Measures of Upper-Limb Function in Pre and Poststroke Rehabilitation: A Pilot Study

Hand function assessment is essential for upper limb rehabilitation of stroke survivors. Conventional acquisition devices have inherent and restrictive difficulties for their clinical usage. Data gloves are limited for applications outside the medical environment, and motion tracking systems setup are time and personnel demanding. We propose a novel instrument designed as a replica of a glass, equipped with an omnidirectional vision system to capture hand images and an inertial measurement unit for movements kinematic data acquisition. Four stroke survivors were invited as volunteers in pre and post-treatment experiments for its evaluating. The exercise of drinking water from a glass was elected for the trails. Before treatment, subjects used their contralesional and ipsilateral hands to perform them. Two main functional features were found in the data analysis. There were differences between limbs in the grasping hand postures, mainly in the index and thumb abduction angle, and in the task timing. After treatment, two volunteers repeated the protocol with their contralesional hands. Changes in the features were observed, index and thumb abduction angles were greater in both cases, and tasks timing were altered in distinct ways. These preliminary results suggest the instrument can be used both in evaluation of hand functional deficit and rehabilitation progress. Improvements and future work are also presented.