A Case Study Characterizing Healthy & Post-Stroke Neuromotor Behavior During 6D Upper-Limb Isometric Gaming:...

Successful robot-mediated rehabilitation requires designing games and robot interventions that pro- mote healthy motor practice. However, the interplay between a given user's neuromotor behavior, the gaming interface, and the physical robot makes designing system elements - and even characterizing what behaviors are "healthy" or pathological - challenging. We leverage our OpenRobotRehab 1.0 open access data set to explore the characteristics of 13 healthy and 2 post-stroke users' force output, muscle activations, and game performance while executing isometric trajectory tracking tasks using an end-effector rehabilitation robot. We present an assessment of how subtle aspects of interface design impact user behavior; an exploratory analysis of how pathological neuromo- tor behaviors are reflected in end-effector force dynamics; and a novel hidden Markov model (HMM)-based neuro-motor behavior classification method based on surface electromyography (sEMG) signals during cyclic motions. We demonstrate that task specification (including which axes are constrained and how users interpret tracking instructions) shapes user behavior; that pathology-related features are detectable in 6D end-effector force data during isometric task execution, but that healthy neuromotor strategies are heterogeneous and inherently difficult to characterize; and that our HMM-based models discriminate healthy and post-stroke neuromotor dynamics where synergy-based decompositions reflect no such differentiation. Lastly, we discuss these results' implications for the design of adaptive end-effector rehabilitation robots capable of promoting healthier movement strategies across diverse user populations.