Fig 1.
Subject performing assessments with the ARMin arm robot (Courtesy of Dietmar Heinz).
Published with written informed consent of the individual in the picture.
Table 1.
Characteristics of the patients.
Table 2.
Study protocol for the patients.
Table 3.
Overview over implemented assessments and the measured parameters.
Fig 2.
Visual representation of the WORKSPACE assessment package.
Screenshot of the WORKSPACE assessment. A room was presented on the screen. The patient looked directly into this room. The end effector of the robot (the position of the patient’s hand) was represented as a small red cube. In the shown situation the patient had to move to the green target position to the right.
Table 4.
Statistical methods for the analysis of the intra-rater reliability, inter-rater reliability and construct validity.
Table 5.
Summary of the significant differences found from the Friedman test of the intra-rater reliability.
Table 6.
Summary of the comparison between data of patients and healthy subjects.
Fig 3.
Visualization of joint stiffness measurements within the RPM assessment for the non-dominant and dominant arms of healthy subjects and patients.
The more a joint counteracted the robot movement over the angle, the higher and more intense in color (red) the value. The color gradient ranges from minimal (blue) to maximal values (red) and is different for the non-dominant (-2 to 4) and dominant arms (-1 to 2).
Fig 4.
Example of an aROM Bland-Altman plot regarding wrist flexion for the nine patient arms.
The limits of agreement (dashed lines for lower -4.3° and upper 5.4° limit) and the mean difference (solid line at 0.5°) are shown. The x-axis shows the mean values of the two measurements of tester 1 and 2 (negative values indicate flexion, positive values stand for extension), while the y-axis shows the measurement difference between tester 1 and 2.
Fig 5.
QOM: The hand paths of a patient moving to the 8 different targets.
Table 7.
Summary for the inter-rater reliability analysis.
Table 8.
Summary of the results for the construct validity.
Table 9.
Correlations between the QOM assessment and the clinical GRASSP, VLT and SCIM scores.
Fig 6.
Plots of the patient joint torques from STRENGTH vs. MMT scores for all joints and in both directions.
(x-axis = MMT score, y-axis = joint torque from STRENGTH).
Fig 7.
Example RPM plot for elbow flexion (60°/s) of two patients (A and B).
The black dotted line shows the torque progression measured during the assessment. The blue dash-dotted line is the data from the calibration routine without the patient. The cyan dashed line is the estimated torque progression of the patient’s joint. The red line is the linear least square fit for the patient’s joint torques. The movement in the left picture was rated a 2 on the Tardieu scale. The movement on the right example was rated a 0 on the Tardieu scale. The measured stiffness by the robot assigned 0.93 Nm/rad to the left and 0.84 Nm/rad to the right movement.