High intra-task and low inter-task correlations of motor skills in humans creates an individualized behavioural pattern.

Our motor system allows us to generate an enormous breadth of voluntary actions, but it remains unclear whether and how much motor skill translates across tasks. For example, if an individual is good at gross motor control, are they also good at fine motor control? Previous research about the generalization across motor skills has been equivocal. Here, we compare human performance across five different motor skills.

Assessment of Neurological Impairment and Recovery Using Statistical Models of Neurologically Healthy Behavior.

While many areas of medicine have benefited from the development of objective assessment tools and biomarkers, there have been comparatively few improvements in techniques used to assess brain function and dysfunction. Brain functions such as perception, cognition, and motor control are commonly measured using criteria-based, ordinal scales which can be coarse, have floor/ceiling effects, and often lack the precision to detect change. There is growing recognition that kinematic and kinetic-based measures are needed to quantify impairments following neurological injury such as stroke, in particular for clinical research and clinical trials.

Impairments in Cognitive Control Using a Reverse Visually Guided Reaching Task Following Stroke.

Background: Cognitive and motor function must work together quickly and seamlessly to allow us to interact with a complex world, but their integration is difficult to assess directly. Interactive technology provides opportunities to assess motor actions requiring cognitive control.

Objective: To adapt a reverse reaching task to an interactive robotic platform to quantify impairments in cognitive-motor integration following stroke.

Robotic tests for position sense and movement discrimination in the upper limb reveal that they each are highly reproducible but not correlated in healthy individuals.

Background: Robotic technologies for neurological assessment provide sensitive, objective measures of behavioural impairments associated with injuries or disease such as stroke. Previous robotic tasks to assess proprioception typically involve single limbs or in some cases both limbs. The challenge with these approaches is that they often rely on intact motor function and/or working memory to remember/reproduce limb position, both of which can be impaired following stroke.

Caregivers' Out-of-Pocket Expenses and Time Commitment Following Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation at a Rural Cancer Center.

The emotional and physical toll on caregivers of cancer patients is well documented, but research evaluating the financial burdens and time commitments of caregivers is limited. We suspected that the rural location of our cancer center would intensify these burdens for caregivers. We conducted a prospective trial to assess the out-of-pocket expenses and time commitment of caregivers of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation recipients within the first 4 weeks after discharge from the hospital from a National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated comprehensive cancer center.