Real-Time Detection of Compensatory Patterns in Patients With Stroke to Reduce Compensation During Robotic Rehabilitation Therapy

Objectives: Compensations are commonly employed by patients with stroke during rehabilitation without therapist supervision, leading to suboptimal recovery outcomes. This study investigated the feasibility of the real-time monitoring of compensation in patients with stroke by using pressure distribution data and machine learning algorithms. Whether trunk compensation can be reduced by combining the online detection of compensation and haptic feedback of a rehabilitation robot was also investigated. Methods: Six patients with stroke did three forms of reaching movements while pressure distribution data were recorded as Dataset1. A support vector machine (SVM) classifier was trained with features extracted from Dataset1. Then, two other patients with stroke performed reaching tasks, and the SVM classifier trained by Dataset1 was employed to classify the compensatory patterns online. Based on the real-time monitoring of compensation, a rehabilitation robot provided an assistive force to patients with stroke to reduce compensations. Results: Good classification performance (F1 score > 0.95) was obtained in both offline and online compensation analysis using the SVM classifier and pressure distribution data of patients with stroke. Based on the real-time detection of compensatory patterns, the angles of trunk rotation, trunk lean-forward and trunk-scapula elevation decreased by 46.95%, 32.35% and 23.75%, respectively. Conclusion: High classification accuracies verified the feasibility of detecting compensation in patients with stroke based on pressure distribution data. Since the validity and reliability of the online detection of compensation has been verified, this classifier can be incorporated into a rehabilitation robot to reduce trunk compensations in patients with stroke.