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Inter-Joint Coordination Deficits Revealed In The Decomposition Of Endpoint Jerk During Goal-Directed Arm Movement After Stroke, Jozsef Laczko, Robert A. Scheidt, Lucia Simo, Davide Piovesan

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

It is well documented that neurological deficits after stroke can disrupt motor control processes that affect the smoothness of reaching movements. The smoothness of hand trajectories during multi-joint reaching depends on shoulder and elbow joint angular velocities and their successive derivatives as well as on the instantaneous arm configuration and its rate of change. Right-handed survivors of unilateral hemiparetic stroke and neurologically-intact control participants held the handle of a two-joint robot and made horizontal planar reaching movements. We decomposed endpoint jerk into components related to shoulder and elbow joint angular velocity, acceleration, and jerk. We observed an abnormal decomposition pattern …