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This study asked if combining different motor learning mechanisms-adaptation and reinforcement-could produce immediate improvements in over ground walking after stroke. Fifteen adults with stroke engaged in three conditions: (1) reinforcement following adaptation, (2) reinforcement alone, and (3) adaptation alone. Adaptation involved split-belt treadmill walking to produce after-effects that reduce step asymmetry. Reinforcement involved the use of real-time auditory feedback about step length asymmetry. Auditory feedback was binary, signaling whether steps were asymmetric or equal, but not whether to shorten or lengthen either step. Change in step length asymmetry was the outcome assessed during over ground walking. Reinforcement following adaptation led to reductions in step length asymmetry that persisted into an immediate retention period. Importantly, it led to the desired pattern of lengthening the shorter step in a majority of participants. Reinforcement alone led to no significant change in step length asymmetry, and sometimes produced a non-optimal pattern of shortening the longer step. Our control condition of adaptation alone led to more transient reductions in step length asymmetry. These findings reveal the potential for utilizing serial delivery of adaptation and reinforcement to influence a complex movement in the real-world context of over ground walking, in people with stroke., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Objective: Video-based pose estimation is an emerging technology that shows significant promise for improving clinical gait analysis by enabling quantitative movement analysis with little costs of money, time, or effort. The objective of this study is to determine the accuracy of pose estimation-based gait analysis when video recordings are constrained to 3 common clinical or in-home settings (ie, frontal and sagittal views of overground walking and sagittal views of treadmill walking)., Methods: Simultaneous video and motion capture recordings were collected from 30 persons after stroke during overground and treadmill walking. Spatiotemporal and kinematic gait parameters were calculated from videos using an open-source human pose estimation algorithm and from motion capture data using traditional gait analysis. Repeated-measures analyses of variance were then used to assess the accuracy of the pose estimation-based gait analysis across the different settings, and the authors examined Pearson and intraclass correlations with ground-truth motion capture data., Results: Sagittal videos of overground and treadmill walking led to more accurate measurements of spatiotemporal gait parameters versus frontal videos of overground walking. Sagittal videos of overground walking resulted in the strongest correlations between video-based and motion capture measurements of lower extremity joint kinematics. Video-based measurements of hip and knee kinematics showed stronger correlations with motion capture versus ankle kinematics for both overground and treadmill walking., Conclusion: Video-based gait analysis using pose estimation provides accurate measurements of step length, step time, and hip and knee kinematics during overground and treadmill walking in persons after stroke. Generally, sagittal videos of overground gait provide the most accurate results., Impact: Many clinicians lack access to expensive gait analysis tools that can help identify patient-specific gait deviations and guide therapy decisions. These findings show that video-based methods that require only common household devices provide accurate measurements of a variety of gait parameters in persons after stroke and could make quantitative gait analysis significantly more accessible., (© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Physical Therapy Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

The lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a variety of crucial roles in higher-order cognitive functions. Previous works have attempted to modulate lateral PFC function by applying non-invasive transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and demonstrated positive effects on performance of tasks involving cognitive processes. The neurophysiological underpinning of the stimulation effects, however, remain poorly understood. Here, we explored the neurophysiological after-effects of tDCS over the lateral PFC by assessing changes in the magnitude of interhemispheric inhibition from the lateral PFC to the contralateral primary motor cortex (PFC-M1 IHI). Using a dual-site transcranial magnetic stimulation paradigm, we assessed PFC-M1 IHI before and after the application of tDCS over the right lateral PFC. We conducted a double-blinded, crossover, and counterbalanced design where 15 healthy volunteers participated in three sessions during which they received either anodal, cathodal, and sham tDCS. In order to determine whether PFC-M1 IHI could be modulated at all, we completed the same assessment on a separate group of 15 participants as they performed visuo-motor reaction tasks that likely engage the lateral PFC. The results showed that tDCS over the right lateral PFC did not modulate the magnitude of PFC-M1 IHI, whereas connectivity changed when Go/NoGo decisions were implemented in reactions during the motor tasks. Although PFC-M1 IHI is sensitive enough to be modulated by behavioral manipulations, tDCS over the lateral PFC does not have substantial modulatory effects on PFC to M1 functional connectivity, or at least not to the degree that can be detected with this measure., (Copyright © 2023 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Abstract: Stroke is a leading cause of long-term disability in adults in the United States. As the healthcare system moves further into an era of digital medicine and remote monitoring, technology continues to play an increasingly important role in post-stroke care. In this Analysis and Perspective article, opportunities for using human pose estimation-an emerging technology that uses artificial intelligence to track human movement kinematics from simple videos recorded using household devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets)-to improve motor assessment and rehabilitation after stroke are discussed. The focus is on the potential of two key applications: (1) improving access to quantitative, objective motor assessment and (2) advancing telerehabilitation for persons post-stroke., Competing Interests: Financial disclosure statements have been obtained, and no conflicts of interest have been reported by the authors or by any individuals in control of the content of this article., (Copyright © 2023 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved.)

Abstract: Motor, speech, and cognitive impairments are the most common consequences of neurological disorders. There has been an increasing interest in the use of noninvasive brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial direct current stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation to augment the effects of neurorehabilitation. Numerous research studies have shown that transcranial direct current stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation are highly promising neuromodulation tools that can work as adjuvants to standard neurorehabilitation services, including physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech-language pathology. However, to date, there are vast differences in methodology in studies including noninvasive brain stimulation parameters, patient characteristics, time point of intervention after injury, and outcome measures, making it difficult to translate and implement transcranial direct current stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation in the clinical setting. Despite this, a series of principles are thought to underlie the effectiveness of noninvasive brain stimulation techniques. We developed a noninvasive brain stimulation rehabilitation program using these principles to provide best practices for applying transcranial direct current stimulation and/or transcranial magnetic stimulation as rehabilitation adjuvants in the clinical setting to help improve neurorehabilitation outcomes. This article outlines our approach, philosophy, and experience., Competing Interests: Financial disclosure statements have been obtained, and no conflicts of interest have been reported by the authors or by any individuals in control of the content of this article., (Copyright © 2023 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved.)

Over the past 3 decades, the volume of human motor learning research has grown enormously. As such, the understanding of motor learning (ie, sustained change in motor behavior) has evolved. It has been learned that there are multiple mechanisms through which motor learning occurs, each with distinctive features. These mechanisms include use-dependent, instructive, reinforcement, and sensorimotor adaptation-based motor learning. It is now understood that these different motor learning mechanisms contribute in parallel or in isolation to drive desired changes in movement, and each mechanism is thought to be governed by distinct neural substrates. This expanded understanding of motor learning mechanisms has important implications for physical therapy. It has the potential to facilitate the development of new, more precise treatment approaches that physical therapists can leverage to improve human movement. This Perspective describes scientific advancements related to human motor learning mechanisms and discusses the practical implications of this work for physical therapist practice and education., (© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Physical Therapy Association.)

The emergence of pose estimation algorithms represents a potential paradigm shift in the study and assessment of human movement. Human pose estimation algorithms leverage advances in computer vision to track human movement automatically from simple videos recorded using common household devices with relatively low-cost cameras (e.g., smartphones, tablets, laptop computers). In our view, these technologies offer clear and exciting potential to make measurement of human movement substantially more accessible; for example, a clinician could perform a quantitative motor assessment directly in a patient's home, a researcher without access to expensive motion capture equipment could analyze movement kinematics using a smartphone video, and a coach could evaluate player performance with video recordings directly from the field. In this review, we combine expertise and perspectives from physical therapy, speech-language pathology, movement science, and engineering to provide insight into applications of pose estimation in human health and performance. We focus specifically on applications in areas of human development, performance optimization, injury prevention, and motor assessment of persons with neurologic damage or disease. We review relevant literature, share interdisciplinary viewpoints on future applications of these technologies to improve human health and performance, and discuss perceived limitations.

Background and Purpose: Restoration of step length symmetry is a common rehabilitation goal after stroke. Persons post-stroke often retain the ability to walk with symmetric step lengths ("symmetric steps"); however, the resulting walking pattern remains effortful. Two key questions with direct implications for rehabilitation have emerged: 1) how do persons post-stroke generate symmetric steps, and 2) why do symmetric steps remain so effortful? Here, we aimed to understand how persons post-stroke generate symmetric steps and explored how the resulting gait pattern may relate to the metabolic cost of transport., Methods: We recorded kinematic, kinetic, and metabolic data as nine persons post-stroke walked on an instrumented treadmill under two conditions: preferred walking and symmetric stepping (using visual feedback)., Results: Gait kinematics and kinetics remained markedly asymmetric even when persons post-stroke improved step length symmetry. Impaired paretic propulsion and aberrant movement of the center of mass were evident during both preferred walking and symmetric stepping. These deficits contributed to diminished positive work performed by the paretic limb on the center of mass in both conditions. Within each condition, decreased positive paretic work correlated with increased metabolic cost of transport and decreased walking speed across participants., Conclusions: It is critical to consider the mechanics used to restore symmetric steps when designing interventions to improve walking after stroke. Future research should consider the many dimensions of asymmetry in post-stroke gait, and additional within-participant manipulations of gait parameters are needed to improve our understanding of the elevated metabolic cost of walking after stroke.

Background: Walking deficits in people post-stroke are often multiple and idiosyncratic in nature. Limited patient and therapist resources necessitate prioritization of deficits such that some may be left unaddressed. More efficient delivery of therapy may alleviate this challenge. Here, we look to determine the utility of a novel principal component-based visual feedback system that targets multiple, patient-specific features of gait in people post-stroke., Methods: Ten individuals with stroke received two sessions of visual feedback to attain a walking goal. This goal consisted of bilateral knee and hip joint angles of a typical 'healthy' walking pattern. The feedback system uses principal component analysis (PCA) to algorithmically weight each of the input features so that participants received one stream of performance feedback. In the first session, participants had to explore different patterns to achieve the goal, and in the second session they were informed of the goal walking pattern. Ten healthy, age-matched individuals received the same paradigm, but with a hemiparetic goal (i.e. to produce the pattern of an exemplar stroke participant). This was to distinguish the extent to which performance limitations in stroke were due neurological injury or the PCA based visual feedback itself., Results: Principal component-based visual feedback can differentially bias multiple features of walking toward a prescribed goal. On average, individuals with stroke typically improved performance via increased paretic knee and hip flexion, and did not perform better with explicit instruction. In contrast, healthy people performed better (i.e. could produce the desired exemplar stroke pattern) in both sessions, and were best with explicit instruction. Importantly, the feedback for stroke participants accommodated a heterogeneous set of walking deficits by individually weighting each feature based on baseline walking., Conclusions: People with and without stroke are able to use this novel visual feedback to train multiple, specific features of gait. Important for stroke, the PCA feedback allowed for targeting of patient-specific deficits. This feedback is flexible to any feature of walking in any plane of movement, thus providing a potential tool for therapists to simultaneously target multiple aberrant features of gait.

Motor exploration, a trial-and-error process in search for better motor outcomes, is known to serve a critical role in motor learning. This is particularly relevant during reinforcement learning, where actions leading to a successful outcome are reinforced while unsuccessful actions are avoided. Although early on motor exploration is beneficial to finding the correct solution, maintaining high levels of exploration later in the learning process might be deleterious. Whether and how the level of exploration changes over the course of reinforcement learning, however, remains poorly understood. Here we evaluated temporal changes in motor exploration while healthy participants learned a reinforcement-based motor task. We defined exploration as the magnitude of trial-to-trial change in movements as a function of whether the preceding trial resulted in success or failure. Participants were required to find the optimal finger-pointing direction using binary feedback of success or failure. We found that the magnitude of exploration gradually increased over time when participants were learning the task. Conversely, exploration remained low in participants who were unable to correctly adjust their pointing direction. Interestingly, exploration remained elevated when participants underwent a second training session, which was associated with faster relearning. These results indicate that the motor system may flexibly upregulate the extent of exploration during reinforcement learning as if acquiring a specific strategy to facilitate subsequent learning. Also, our findings showed that exploration affects reinforcement learning and vice versa, indicating an interactive relationship between them. Reinforcement-based tasks could be used as primers to increase exploratory behavior leading to more efficient subsequent learning. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Motor exploration, the ability to search for the correct actions, is critical to learning motor skills. Despite this, whether and how the level of exploration changes over the course of training remains poorly understood. We showed that exploration increased and remained high throughout training of a reinforcement-based motor task. Interestingly, elevated exploration persisted and facilitated subsequent learning. These results suggest that the motor system upregulates exploration as if learning a strategy to facilitate subsequent learning.

Remote limb ischemic conditioning (RLIC) is a clinically feasible method of promoting tissue protection against subsequent ischemic insult. Recent findings from our lab demonstrated that RLIC robustly enhances motor learning in young, healthy humans. The next step is to determine which individuals would receive maximum benefit from RLIC before applying these findings to clinical rehabilitation populations such as stroke. Numerous factors, such as age, sex, body mass index (BMI), and cardiovascular comorbidities may influence the response. Sixty-nine participants aged 40-80 were randomized to receive either RLIC (n = 33) or sham (n = 36) conditioning. Participants underwent seven consecutive sessions consisting of RLIC or sham conditioning with a blood pressure cuff on the upper extremity and motor training on a stability platform balance task, with two follow-up sessions. Balance change (post-test-pre-test) was compared across participants, groups, and the factors of age, sex, BMI, and comorbidities. Participants in both groups improved their performance on the balance task from pre- to post-test. Overall balance change was independently associated with age and BMI. There was no difference in balance change between RLIC and Sham groups. However, RLIC significantly enhanced balance performance in participants with no comorbidities. Compared with our previous study in young adults, middle-aged and older adults demonstrated smaller improvements on the balance task. RLIC enhanced learning in middle-aged and older adults only in the absence of pre-defined comorbidities. RLIC may be a promising tool for enhancing motor recovery, but the accumulation of comorbidity with age may decrease its effectiveness.

Background: Gait impairments after stroke arise from dysfunction of one or several features of the walking pattern. Traditional rehabilitation practice focuses on improving one component at a time, which may leave certain features unaddressed or prolong rehabilitation time. Recent work shows that neurologically intact adults can learn multiple movement components simultaneously., Objective: To determine whether a dual-learning paradigm, incorporating 2 distinct motor tasks, can simultaneously improve 2 impaired components of the gait pattern in people posttroke., Methods: Twelve individuals with stroke participated. Participants completed 2 sessions during which they received visual feedback reflecting paretic knee flexion during walking. During the learning phase of the experiment, an unseen offset was applied to this feedback, promoting increased paretic knee flexion. During the first session, this task was performed while walking on a split-belt treadmill intended to improve step length asymmetry. During the second session, it was performed during tied-belt walking., Results: The dual-learning task simultaneously increased paretic knee flexion and decreased step length asymmetry in the majority of people post-stroke. Split-belt treadmill walking did not significantly interfere with joint-angle learning: participants had similar rates and magnitudes of joint-angle learning during both single and dual-learning conditions. Participants also had significant changes in the amount of paretic hip flexion in both single and dual-learning conditions., Conclusions: People with stroke can perform a dual-learning paradigm and change 2 clinically relevant gait impairments in a single session. Long-term studies are needed to determine if this strategy can be used to efficiently and permanently alter multiple gait impairments.

The authors tested whether 2 doses of remote limb ischemic conditioning (RLIC), induced via blood pressure cuff inflation, enhanced motor and cognitive learning to an equal extent, and explored a panel of blood biomarkers of RLIC. Thirty-two young adults were randomized to 3 groups and underwent a 7-day protocol of RLIC/sham followed by motor and cognitive training, with follow-up. Both RLIC groups had greater motor learning and a trend toward greater cognitive learning compared with the sham group. RLIC at the lower inflation pressure was as effective as RLIC with the higher inflation pressure. No significant candidate blood biomarkers were found. RLIC could be a well-tolerated method to enhance learning and improve rehabilitation outcomes in people with neurological conditions.

Objective: The objectives of this work were to (1) determine whether higher doses of motor therapy in chronic poststroke hemiparesis result in better outcomes, compared to lower doses, and (2) evaluate potential modifiers of the dose-response relationship., Methods: Eighty-five adults with upper extremity paresis ≥6 months poststroke were randomized to one of four dose groups in this single-blind, parallel, randomized, control trial. The dosing parameter manipulated was amount of task-specific training, as indexed by the number of task repetitions. Groups received 3,200, 6,400, 9,600, or individualized maximum (IM) repetitions, during 1-hour sessions, 4 days/week for 8 weeks. The intervention was an individualized, progressive, task-specific upper-limb training program designed to improve upper-limb functional motor capacity. The primary outcome was the slope of the Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) during the intervention. Effects of dose and potential modifiers of the dose-response relationship were evaluated with hierarchical linear models., Results: ARAT scores for the 3,200, 9,600, and IM groups improved over time as indicated by slopes (ΔARAT/week, mean ± standard errors) of 0.40 ± 0.15, 0.31 ± 0.16, and 0.66 ± 0.14, respectively (p < 0.05). The slope of the 6,400 group was smaller (-0.05 ± 0.15) and significantly different from the 3,200 and IM groups (p < 0.001). Initial motor capacity, neglect, and other tested characteristics did not modify the dose-response relationship., Interpretation: Overall, treatment effects were small. There was no evidence of a dose-response effect of task-specific training on functional capacity in people with long-standing upper-limb paresis poststroke. Ann Neurol 2016;80:342-354., Competing Interests: There are no potential conflicts of interest between the authors and any commercial sponsors., (© 2016 American Neurological Association.)

Brief bouts of sublethal ischemia have been shown to protect exposed tissue (ischemic conditioning) and tissues at remote sites (remote ischemic conditioning) against subsequent ischemic challenges. Given that the mechanisms of this protective phenomenon are multifactorial and epigenetic, we postulated that remote limb ischemic conditioning (RLIC) might enhance mechanisms responsible for neural plasticity, and thereby facilitate learning. Specifically, we hypothesized that conditioning of the nervous system with RLIC, achieved through brief repetitive limb ischemia prior to training, would facilitate the neurophysiological processes of learning, thus making training more effective and more long-lasting. Eighteen healthy adults participated in this study; nine were randomly allocated to RLIC and nine to sham conditioning. All subjects underwent seven consecutive weekday sessions and 2-wk and 4-wk follow-up sessions. We found that RLIC resulted in significantly greater motor learning and longer retention of motor performance gains in healthy adults. Changes in motor performance do not appear to be due to a generalized increase in muscle activation or muscle strength and were not associated with changes in serum brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) concentration. Of note, RLIC did not enhance cognitive learning on a hippocampus-dependent task. While future research is needed to establish optimal conditioning and training parameters, this inexpensive, clinically feasible paradigm might ultimately be implemented to enhance motor learning in individuals undergoing neuromuscular rehabilitation for brain injury and other pathological conditions., (Copyright © 2015 the American Physiological Society.)