A Serious Game System for Upper Limb Motor Function Assessment of Hemiparetic Stroke Patients

Abstract

Stroke often results in hemiparesis, impairing the patient's motor abilities and leading to upper extremity motor deficits that require long-term training and assessment. However, existing methods for assessing patients' motor function rely on clinical scales that require experienced physicians to guide patients through target tasks during the assessment process. This process is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but the complex assessment process is also uncomfortable for patients and has significant limitations. For this reason, we propose a serious game that automatically assesses the degree of upper limb motor impairment in stroke patients. Specifically, we divide this serious game into a preparation stage and a competition stage. In each stage, we construct motor features based on clinical a priori knowledge to reflect the ability indicators of the patient's upper limbs. These features all correlated significantly with the Fugl-Meyer Assessment for Upper Extremity (FMA-UE), which assesses motor impairment in stroke patients. In addition, we design membership functions and fuzzy rules for motor features in combination with the opinions of rehabilitation therapists to construct a hierarchical fuzzy inference system to assess the motor function of upper limbs in stroke patients. In this study, we recruited a total of 24 patients with varying degrees of stroke and 8 healthy controls to participate in the Serious Game System test. The results show that our Serious Game System was able to effectively differentiate between controls, severe, moderate, and mild hemiparesis with an average accuracy of 93.5%.

A decision support system for upper limb rehabilitation robot based on hybrid reasoning with RBR and CBR

“…Stroke is often accompanied by limb motor dysfunction occurs, statistics show that stroke patients have a 55%–75% chance of suffering from motor dysfunction ( Chen et al, 2022 ), of which 80% of patients with upper limb dysfunction ( Dhiman et al, 2018 ). The lack of upper limb function makes it difficult for patients to perform activities of daily living independently, which leads to serious family and social issues ( Jiang et al, 2023 ), thus it is necessary to cooperate with rehabilitation training to treat or reduce the upper limb motor dysfunction caused by strokes ( Dunkelberger et al, 2020 ). An effective decision-making prescription for rehabilitation training plays an important role in improving the motor function of stroke patients ( LI et al, 2020 ).…”