Abstract
Background: Children with cerebral palsy (CP) have difficulty in managing postural control during functional reaching tasks, although children with different postural control ability are able to come up with different motor solutions to cope with different task demands. This study examined the effect of task constraint on postural control performance in children with cerebral palsy and typical development (TD) in terms of different postural control abilities. Methods: A cross-sectional research design was used. Twelve children with spastic diplegic cerebral palsy (mean age: 107.8 months) and 16 typically developing children (mean age: 110.9 months) participated in this study. Individually, all subjects were seated in a height-adjusted chair and were requested to reach for target(s) located at three different directions (medial, anterior, and lateral). A six-camera Qualisys Motion Capture System was used to capture motion data. Kinematic data in terms of body alignment and angular changes were analyzed. Results: Children with cerebral palsy demonstrated different postural control strategies to complete different reaching tasks compared to typically developing children by preparing postural alignment in advance, coordinating different body orientation movements during reaching after showing difficulty in managing reach medially. Conclusions: Children with cerebral palsy perceive their insufficient ability and prepare their alignment in advance to adapt to the task demanded and decrease the postural challenges of the task. Even though children with cerebral palsy self-generate different motor solutions to reach without falling, these alternative strategies might not be the most efficient adaptation.
Highlights
Task context could constrain the output of motor behavior in terms of movement patterns [1,2,3]
Individuals would actively perceive these features and choose preferred motor patterns to achieve task goals. These preferred motor patterns should fit with the task demands [4]; these preferred motor patterns are not necessarily consistent across groups characterized with different features such as children with cerebral palsy (CP) vs. typical development (TD) [5]
Children with CP apparently aligned their head with greater degrees of rotation in advance than did TD children (Table 1), indicating that children with CP prepared their body orientation with consideration of the reaching direction
Summary
Task context could constrain the output of motor behavior in terms of movement patterns [1,2,3]. The literature presents children with CP as demonstrating stereotypical motor control, inadequate coordination, motor inefficiency, slow speed of movement, use of immature motor synergy, use of variable recruitment patterns, delayed response with external disturbance, insufficiency of subtle motor adjustment/regulation, and insufficient anticipated postural control, etc., as they perform functional tasks or deal with balance threats [8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. These motor problems could be affected by these multiple factors, and as children with CP have deficit in sensorimotor integration, anticipating control of force regulation could be impaired [15].
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