Grant: Project Grant

Vision is what sense of being able to see. Proprioception is the sense of where the limbs or body are in space. Approximately two-thirds of stroke survivors have problems with vision and half have problems with proprioception. Impairments in these senses lead to difficulties performing daily tasks and longer hospital stays. At the bedside, clinicians tend to use crude measurements of vision and proprioception. For vision, clinicians may have the patient attempt to track the clinician's finger to test eye movements and get the patient to count fingers to measure visual fields. For proprioception, clinicians often ask the patient to close their eyes and then passively move the patient's finger up or down and ask which direction it was moved in. Our team has spent many years developing and validating more precise, reliable measures of proprioception using robotics. We recently integrated eye tracking technology into our robots. The current project revolves around improving our understanding of visual and proprioceptive loss after stroke and its impact on reaching movements using these technologies. We are particularly interested in examining the integration of vision and proprioception and the brain regions responsible for these senses. We plan to recruit stroke survivors within the first few days post-stroke and they will complete a series of automated robotic assessments of vision and proprioception over the following 6 months, alongside several routine clinical assessments. We will also recruit healthy individuals to develop normative datasets. Study participants will complete brain MRI's (magnetic resonance images) which will allow us to better understand how different types of brain damage from stroke impact the recovery of vision and proprioception. We believe improving our understanding of this will allow us to develop better and more personalized therapies for stroke survivors.