Abstract
Dynamic motor imagery (dMI) is a motor imagery task associated with movements partially mimicking those mentally represented. As well as conventional motor imagery, dMI has been typically assessed by mental chronometry tasks. In this paper, an instrumented approach was proposed for quantifying the correspondence between upper and lower limb oscillatory movements performed on the spot during the dMI of walking vs. during actual walking. Magneto-inertial measurement units were used to measure limb swinging in three different groups: young adults, older adults and stroke patients. Participants were tested in four experimental conditions: (i) simple limb swinging; (ii) limb swinging while imagining to walk (dMI-task); (iii) mental chronometry task, without any movement (pure MI); (iv) actual level walking at comfortable speed. Limb swinging was characterized in terms of the angular velocity, frequency of oscillations and sinusoidal waveform. The dMI was effective at reproducing upper limb oscillations more similar to those occurring during walking for all the three groups, but some exceptions occurred for lower limbs. This finding could be related to the sensory feedback, stretch reflexes and ground reaction forces occurring for lower limbs and not for upper limbs during walking. In conclusion, the instrumented approach through wearable motion devices adds significant information to the current dMI approach, further supporting their applications in neurorehabilitation for monitoring imagery training protocols in patients with stroke.
Highlights
Motor imagery (MI) is the mental representation of an action without its physical execution [1] and it represents one of the most promising emergent therapies for motor impairment treatment
Given the purpose of this study, magneto-inertial measurement units (MIMUs) were fruitfully used for assessing the motor behaviours of healthy and stroke subjects
Previous studies used a single MIMU for comparing Dynamic motor imagery (dMI) and actual walking [6,39], but in our study the use of more MIMUs allowed for the above comparison of the single limb swinging analysis
Summary
Motor imagery (MI) is the mental representation of an action without its physical execution [1] and it represents one of the most promising emergent therapies for motor impairment treatment. During MI, subjects partially simulate the imagined movements [4] Another aspect revealing the intertwinement between MI and sensorimotor systems is the need to adopt a posture congruent with the imagined movement for facilitating the simulation process, for locomotor imagery [5]. In real practice, such as sports training or rehabilitation, MI does not replace physical exercises and the importance of decoupling MI from the real execution of action decays, allowing the possibility of coupling them to enhance the efficacy of the training [6,7]. A patient with a subacute stroke, who has recovered their standing posture but not yet their walking ability, is often asked by physiotherapist to step in place, move their lower limbs alternatively, and imagine walking, coupling
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