A Novel Wrist Device for Characterizing the Components of Proprioceptive Acuity

Proprioception is important in human motor control but can be impaired by neurological disease. Unfortunately, our understanding of proprioceptive deficit is very limited, especially for important joints such as the wrist. To address this gap, we have constructed a robotic testbed designed to measure different aspects of proprioceptive acuity at the human wrist during pronation/supination. Utilizing the testbed, we conducted a battery of psychometric tests with N = 11 neurologically-intact individuals to validate the robot's ability to quantify position, velocity, and torque sensing capabilities, both actively and passively. Overall, our findings demonstrate that the testbed can capture different acuity metrics in healthy participants, and that passive and active velocity senses are different in healthy individuals. In the future, we plan to expand the device to test other wrist degrees of freedom, and we plan to implement the testbed for individuals living with stroke to help better inform personalized treatment for faster recovery.