Spectral Analyses of Wrist Motion in Individuals Poststroke The Development of a Performance Measure With Promise for Unsupervised Settings

Background. Upper extremity use in daily life is a critical ingredient of continued functional recovery after cerebral stroke. However, time-evolutions of use-dependent motion quality are poorly understood due to limitations of existing measurement tools. Objective. Proof-of-concept study to determine if spectral analyses explain the variability of known temporal kinematic movement quality (ie, movement duration, number of peaks, jerk) for uncontrolled reach-to-grasp tasks. Methods. Ten individuals with chronic stroke performed unimanual goal-directed movements using both hands, with and without task object present, wearing accelerometers on each wrist. Temporal and spectral measures were extracted for each gesture. The effects of performance condition on outcome measures were determined using 2-way, within subject, hand (nonparetic vs paretic) × object (present vs absent) analysis of variance. Regression analyses determined if spectral measures explained the variability of the temporal measures. Results....