Role of EMG as a complementary tool for assessment of motor impairment

Due to the aging population and increase in the number of neurological injuries, the demand for physical therapy has increased. As a result, in recent years robotic devices have been introduced to address the neuro-rehabilitation needs and have been proved to augment the recovery process. Results from a preliminary assessment study on a planar reaching task are presented in this paper. H-Man, a novel upper limb rehabilitation planar robot is employed for the study with ten healthy control subjects - divided into young and aged adults (to understand the effect of aging) and two chronic stroke patients with motor impairment. The assessment of performance was made through kinematic task parameters (smoothness of movement and time to peak velocity) and EMG signal measure (Integrated Average Value) from the upper limb muscles. This revealed significant differences between the groups. The results of the study indicated the potential use of EMG-based metric as a complementary measure to generally-used end effector robotic metrics to track the recovery process.