Feedback-mediated upper extremities exercise: increasing patient motivation in poststroke rehabilitation.

Purpose: This proof-of-concept study investigated whether feedback-mediated exercise (FME) of the affected arm of hemiplegic patients increases patient motivation and promotes greater improvement of motor function, compared to no-feedback exercise (NFE).

Method: We developed a feedback-mediated treatment that uses gaming scenarios and allows online and offline monitoring of both temporal and spatial characteristics of planar movements. Twenty poststroke hemiplegic inpatients, randomly assigned to the FME and NFE group, received therapy five days a week for three weeks.