Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Despite advances in the management of stroke from a medical and rehabilitation perspective, among Canadians who have had a stroke, overall health-related quality of life associated with chronic impaired arm and hand function is declining. This suggests a need to investigate novel approaches to enhance recovery of arm function. Successful rehabilitation of arm function depends on the ability to re-learn the motor skill of reaching. Often after a stroke, voluntary arm movement is not possible without assistance from a therapist physically guiding the impaired arm through many movement repetitions. Studies of reach training in healthy adults have not found this method to be as effective as active practice, suggesting learners require both the experience of generating the movement and the sensation of what it feels like as it is moving to retain the learned skill. This can be made possible with a new approach to guidance using a bimanual robot. I propose to use a bimanual robot, to yoke the movement of one robot arm to match the movements of an active robot arm. This allows a learner to engage in unassisted physical practice with one arm, such that it guides the yoked arm which experiences the sensation of the same movement. The rationale for this approach is supported by evidence that learning a reaching task with one arm transfers to the opposite arm in healthy adults. The proposed method will first be validated in healthy adults before being tested in individuals with impaired arm function secondary to a stroke. Performance on the reaching task will be assessed in both arms prior to and following the intervention. I hypothesize that arm movement speed and accuracy (recorded by the robot during reaching task training) of the yoked arm will improve as a result of self-guided bimanual movement training. This work could provide valuable insight and rationale for the potential use of robot-assisted therapies clinically as a tool to enhance arm rehabilitation after stroke.