Accelerometer assessed upper limb activity in people with stroke: a validation study considering ambulatory and non-ambulatory activities

Quantification of Movement in Stroke Patients under Free Living Conditions Using Wearable Sensors: A Systematic Review

“…One study was excluded due to poor methodological quality, scoring only four points ( Supplementary Materials ). Out of the remaining 32 studies that were included for data synthesis, 29 (91%) were of high quality [ 5 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 ] and three (9%) of moderate quality [ 43 , 44 , 45 ]. This inclusion process is described in Figure 1 .…”

“…In total 1076 stroke patients were included in the 32 studies, ranging from four to 169 stroke patients per study. Ten studies included data of in total 236 healthy controls in their analysis [ 5 , 8 , 20 , 23 , 29 , 33 , 35 , 36 , 40 , 44 , 45 ]. The reported average age of the stroke participants was 61 years while healthy participants were usually younger with a reported average of 55.8 years.…”

“…Reported Time After Stroke (TAS) was highly different between studies: five studies took place during the acute phase of stroke [ 33 , 38 , 40 , 42 , 43 ]—less than a week, as defined by Bernhardt et al [ 46 ]—another eight included patients during the early sub-acute phase [ 5 , 10 , 21 , 22 , 25 , 30 , 34 , 39 ] and eleven focused on chronic stroke patients [ 8 , 9 , 11 , 20 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 36 , 41 , 44 ]. The remaining articles included patients which were in different phases after stroke onset: acute and early sub-acute [ 23 , 24 ], early-subacute and late subacute [ 19 ], late sub-acute and chronic [ 35 ] or early, late and chronic phase [ 31 , 32 , 37 , 45 ]. See Appendix A for details.…”

“…Most of the studies—26 of 32—focused their research exclusively on upper limb functioning and placed the sensors on the wrists or forearms, while twelve of these studies also placed sensors on other parts of the body [ 10 , 19 , 20 , 26 , 29 , 31 , 32 , 35 , 36 , 39 , 43 , 44 ]. Except for the studies [ 29 , 44 ], in which the (electrohydraulic) sensors were placed along the arm, from shoulder to wrist, and [ 36 ] in which a magnetic ring was used as part of the setup, the information of the additional sensors was used to derive parameters for full body kinematic models [ 31 , 32 ], activity recognition or gait detection [ 10 , 19 , 20 , 26 , 35 , 39 ]. Four studies combined upper and lower body data [ 5 , 34 , 37 , 43 ], and three focused on walking only, in particular on the amount, number of walking bouts and gait characteristics [ 11 , 21 , 23 ].…”

“…Most of the upper limb activity related movement measures were based on the magnitude of the 3D accelerometer vector . Several studies [ 5 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 19 , 20 , 22 , 24 , 25 , 28 , 30 , 35 , 36 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 ] integrated this value over a time window -ranging from a few seconds [ 8 ] to several hours [ 10 ]- to quantify the amount and intensity of upper limb movement. Studies that reported their findings using similar values, like the signal magnitude area [ 34 ], or ‘counts’ are also included in this category.…”