Identifying patterns of proprioception and target matching acuity in healthy humans

TL;DR

This study introduces a multimodal wrist sensing device to characterize normative kinesthetic perception and performance in healthy humans, aiming to establish a baseline for identifying deficits post-stroke.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel wrist sensing device and provides initial normative data on kinesthetic perception and performance, highlighting differences between passive and active sensing.

Findings

Passive velocity sense correlates with active position sense in healthy controls.

Participants show differences in acuity between passive and active velocity sense.

No significant correlation between other measures of acuity or task performance.

Abstract

Traditional approaches to measurement in upper-limb therapy have gaps that electronic sensing and recording can help fill. We highlight shortcomings in current kinematic recording devices, and we introduce a wrist sensing device that performs multimodal sensing during single-axis rotation. Our goal is to characterize normative kinesthetic perception and real-world performance as a multimodal sensory "fingerprint" that can serve as a reference point for identifying deficit in persons affected by stroke, and then as a jumping point for later neuroscientific interrogation. We present an experiment involving psychophysical measurements of passive stimuli discrimination, matching adjustment acuity, and ADL performance in 11 neurologically-intact persons. We found that passive velocity sense and active position sense of healthy controls, measured by velocity discrimination and position matching respectively, correlated in rank with each other, but other score comparisons of acuity or task performance had no statistically significant correlations. We also found that participants differed in acuity between passive and active velocity sense, which supports current understanding about muscle spindle activation being modulated by conscious motor command. The potential for our null correlation results to reveal dissociable aspects of deficit is discussed, as well as implications for future neuroscientific study with more kinematic measures and larger datasets.