A Feasible Way to Assess the Lower Extremity Motor Function of Stroke Patients - A Preliminary Study

Accurate assessment of the mobility of stroke patients is crucial to their rehabilitation management. In order to quantify the lower extremity motor function in stroke sufferers, two tasks, toe tapping and knee flexion and extension, were designed based on the Brunnstrom approach. In this work, five hemiplegic patients in Brunnstrom stage III or IV were recruited. Acceleration signals under different tasks were recorded using tri-axial accelerometers, which were placed at the arches of the feet. Various kinematic parameters were then calculated, and a statistical test was conveyed to investigate the correlations between Brunnstrom stages and the features. The results showed that in the toe tapping task, the dominant frequency of the y-axis and the proportion of signal power in specific frequency band of the x-axis were significantly higher in stage III than in stage IV. On the contrary, the standard deviation and the skewness of the y-axis were lower in stage III. Besides, there were also significant differences in the amplitude of knee flexion between cohorts at different Brunnstrom stages. It is expected that the findings of this study would be helpful for the monitoring and rehabilitation of stroke patients.