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.
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.
