Customized therapy using distributions of reaching errors

Abstract

While there has been recent success with robotic therapy approaches, individual differences in motor impairments motivate the need for customized therapy. Our latest work with healthy participants considered the likelihood of one's error to construct a customized force field training environment, which we termed an error field. We believe error statistics could characterize individual motor impairments for stroke survivors. Here we present preliminary results from a pilot study testing this therapy technique on individuals following stroke. We tracked the changes in error for three stroke survivors across multiple days using error field training, and found that participants' errors reduced for all target directions across sessions. We also used a modeling approach to test whether the changes in error reflected the specific mathematical structure of the intervention. These results provide encouraging preliminary evidence that error field training can be valuable for both characterizing deficits and custom-tailoring therapy.