Orna Rosenthal, Chris Miall (School of Psychology) and David Punt (School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences) were recently awarded an MRC Confidence in Concept grant of £98,000 to develop their methods for mapping upper limb motor performance after stroke.

This work follows on from an MRC funded study in which the team showed a significant benefit for individualised rehabilitation of upper limb movements in chronic stroke patients. The study used robot-assisted rehabilitation, but uniquely added an algorithm to select the training movements for each patient, based on a ‘map’ of their performance.

The new CiC award will extend this work, testing larger numbers of stroke patients, and will address the hypothesis that the patients can be clustered into a small number of groups with similar impairments, so speeding up the selection of their rehabilitation training.

Image caption: Movements across a 2D workspace are defined by two angles (left image), so that each movement can be plotted on a map (the white dot on the right image). Here the red and blue colours represent two aspects of impairment for a single stroke patient.

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