Abstract
BackgroundOur previous work showed that speed is linked to the ability to recover in chronic stroke survivors. Participants moving faster on the first day of a 3-week study had greater improvements on the Wolf Motor Function Test.MethodsWe examined the effects of three candidate speed-modifying fields in a crossover design: negative viscosity, positive viscosity, and a “breakthrough” force that vanishes after speed exceeds an individualized threshold.ResultsNegative viscosity resulted in a significant speed increase when it was on. No lasting after effects on movement speed were observed from any of these treatments, however, training with negative viscosity led to significant improvements in movement accuracy and smoothness.ConclusionsOur results suggest that negative viscosity could be used as a treatment to augment the training process while still allowing participants to make their own volitional motions in practice.Trial registrationThis study was approved by the Institutional Review Boards at Northwestern University (STU00206579) and the University of Illinois at Chicago (2018-1251).
Highlights
Our previous work showed that speed is linked to the ability to recover in chronic stroke survivors
While we were mainly interested in the direct- and after-effects of these force paradigms on participant movement speed, we examined their effects on other movement metrics as well, such as error, efficiency, and smoothness
Movement speed Negative viscosity produced significant speed increases during early exposure that persisted through late exposure ( p < 0.0004, Fig. 4)
Summary
Our previous work showed that speed is linked to the ability to recover in chronic stroke survivors. Even some traditional physical therapy exercises use mirrors to get the paretic side of the body to imitate the non-paretic side [9]. We found that participant movement speed during the initial evaluation was most predictive of clinical changes This speed was the most strongly correlated with changes in the Wolf Motor Function Test (WMFT), making heightened speed a possible intervention for stroke. Before such an intervention might be tested in clinical trials, we need to establish effective methods for speeding up participants
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