Understanding Post-Stroke Movement by Means of Motion Capture and Musculoskeletal Modeling: A Scoping Review of Methods and Practices

Abstract

Research of post-stroke locomotion via musculoskeletal (MSK) modeling has offered an unprecedented insight into pathological muscle function and its interplay with skeletal geometry and external stimuli. Advances in solving the dynamical system of post-stroke effort and the generic MSK models used have triggered noticeable improvements in simulating muscle activation dynamics of stroke populations. However, a review of these advancements to inform the scientific community has yet to be made.: PubMed and Scopus databases were used to perform a thorough literature search to identify relevant articles since 2010. Here, we review MSK methods and practices—developed in the last ten years—that have been utilized to explore post-stroke locomotion and examine how their outcomes can inform clinical practice.: Out of the 44 articles that were initially found, 19 were reviewed. The articles were categorized with respect to the type of assessment the MSK methods were used for.: This review notes the considerable competence of existing methods to address post-stroke motion deficits. However, the drawbacks in the implementation of such methods by non-experts due to the high skill demand and the lack of mature software technology for further dissemination of practices and outcomes remain non-trivial.