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.

Assessment of upper-limb sensorimotor function of subacute stroke patients using visually guided reaching.

Objective: Using robotic technology, we examined the ability of a visually guided reaching task to assess the sensorimotor function of patients with stroke.

Methods: Ninety-one healthy participants and 52 with subacute stroke of mild to moderate severity (26 with left- and 26 with right-affected body sides) performed an unassisted reaching task using the KINARM robot. Each participant was assessed using 12 movement parameters that were grouped into 5 attributes of sensorimotor control.