Engineering to enhance human mobility, play, and exploration
Congratulations to Alyssa Spomer for being awarded the Husky 100. This award recognizes 100 students who are making the most of their time at UW through coursework, research, volunteer and leadership efforts, internships, and jobs: they have created their own Husky Experience.
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Journal Article in Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology:
This retrospective analysis demonstrated that energy consumption is not reduced after rhizotomy when compared to matched controls with cerebral palsy.
Aim: To determine whether energy consumption changes after selective dorsal rhizotomy (SDR) among children with cerebral palsy (CP).
Method: We retrospectively evaluated net nondimensional energy consumption during walking among 101 children with bilateral spastic CP who underwent SDR (59 males, 42 females; median age [5th centile, 95th centile] 5y 8mo [4y 2mo, 9y 4mo]) compared to a control group of children with CP who did not undergo SDR. The control group was matched by baseline age, spasticity, and energy consumption (56 males, 45 females; median age [5th centile, 95th centile] 5y 8mo [4y 1mo, 9y 6mo]). Outcomes were compared at baseline and follow‐up (SDR: mean [SD] 1y 7mo [6mo], control: 1y 8mo [8mo]).
Results: The SDR group had significantly greater decreases in spasticity compared to matched controls (–42% SDR vs –20% control, p<0.001). While both groups had a modest reduction in energy consumption between visits (–12% SDR, –7% control), there was no difference in change in energy consumption (p=0.11) or walking speed (p=0.56) between groups.
Interpretation: The SDR group did not exhibit greater reductions in energy consumption compared to controls. The SDR group had significantly greater spasticity reduction, suggesting that spasticity had minimal impact on energy consumption during walking in CP. These results support prior findings that spasticity and energy consumption decrease with age in CP. Identifying matched control groups is critical for outcomes research involving children with CP to account for developmental changes.
Journal Article in Prosthetics & Orthotics International
Assessments of human movement are clinically important. However, accurate measurements are often unavailable due to the need for expensive equipment or intensive processing. For orthotists and therapists, shank-to-vertical angle (SVA) is one critical measure used to assess gait and guide prescriptions. Smartphone-based sensors may provide a widely-available platform to expand access to quantitative assessments.
Assess accuracy and repeatability of smartphone-based measurement of SVA compared to marker-based 3D motion analysis.
Four licensed clinicians (two physical therapists and two orthotists) measured SVA during gait with a smartphone attached to the anterior or lateral shank surface of unimpaired adults. We compared SVA calculated from the smartphone’s inertial measurement unit to marker-based measurements. Each clinician completed three sessions/day on two days with each participant to assess repeatability.
Average absolute differences in SVA measured with a smartphone versus marker-based 3D motion analysis during gait were 0.67 ± 0.25° and 4.89 ± 0.72°, with anterior or lateral smartphone positions, respectively. The inter- and intra-day repeatability of SVA were within 2° for both smartphone positions.
Smartphone sensors can be used to measure SVA with high accuracy and repeatability during unimpaired gait, providing a widely-available tool for quantitative gait assessments.
The app for monitoring shank-to-vertical angle is available for you to download and use on either Android or iOS smartphone. Please complete THIS SURVEY which will then send you an e-mail with instructions for installation and use. This app is not an FDA approved medical device and should be used appropriately.
Journal Article in Journal of NeuroEngineering & Rehabilitation
Accelerometers have become common for evaluating the efficacy of rehabilitation for patients with neurologic disorders. For example, metrics like use ratio (UR) and magnitude ratio (MR) have been shown to differentiate movement patterns of children with cerebral palsy (CP) compared to typically-developing (TD) peers. However, these metrics are calculated from “activity counts” – a measure based on proprietary algorithms that approximate movement duration and intensity from raw accelerometer data. Algorithms used to calculate activity counts vary between devices, limiting comparisons of clinical and research results. The goal of this research was to develop complementary metrics based on raw accelerometer data to analyze arm movement after neurologic injury.
We calculated jerk, the derivative of acceleration, to evaluate arm movement from accelerometer data. To complement current measures, we calculated jerk ratio (JR) as the relative jerk magnitude of the dominant (non-paretic) and non-dominant (paretic) arms. We evaluated the JR distribution between arms and calculated the 50th percentile of the JR distribution (JR50). To evaluate these metrics, we analyzed bimanual accelerometry data for five children with hemiplegic CP who underwent Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy (CIMT) and five typically developing (TD) children. We compared JR between the CP and TD cohorts, and to activity count metrics.
The JR50 differentiated between the CP and TD cohorts (CP = 0.578±0.041 before CIMT, TD = 0.506±0.026), demonstrating increased reliance on the non-dominant arm for the CP cohort. Jerk metrics also quantified changes in arm use during and after therapy (e.g., JR50 = 0.378±0.125 during CIMT, 0.591 ± 0.057 after CIMT). The JR was strongly correlated with UR and MR (r = -0.92, 0.89) for the CP cohort. For the TD cohort, JR50 was repeatable across three data collection periods with an average similarity of 0.945±0.015.
Acceleration-derived jerk captured differences in motion between TD and CP cohorts and correlated with activity count metrics. The code for calculating and plotting JR is open-source and available for others to use and build upon. By identifying device-independent metrics that can quantify arm movement in daily life, we hope to facilitate collaboration for rehabilitation research using wearable technologies.
The algorithm for calculating jerk ratio, as well as user-friendly code to produce plots similar to the figure above are provided open-source as Python 3.6 code as a Python Jupyter Notebook within Google Colab. With this resource, research groups can use existing or newly created data from accelerometers to analyze jerk ratio as a complementary metric to existing measures, enabling comparison between research studies or centers that may rely on different sensors and activity count algorithms.
Journal Article in Frontiers of Neurorobotics:
This study demonstrated that muscle activations estimated from static optimization using generic musculoskeletal modeling does not accurately predict EMG profiles for children with CP or TD peers. Constraining activation patterns to experimentally measured synergies increased estimated muscle stresses, but did not improve the estimation of muscle activations for either group.
Neuromusculoskeletal simulation provides a promising platform to inform the design of assistive devices or inform rehabilitation. For these applications, a simulation must be able to accurately represent the person of interest, such as an individual with a neurologic injury. If a simulation fails to predict how an individual recruits and coordinates their muscles during movement, it will have limited utility for informing design or rehabilitation. While inverse dynamic simulations have previously been used to evaluate anticipated responses from interventions, like orthopaedic surgery or orthoses, they frequently struggle to accurately estimate muscle activations, even for tasks like walking. The simulated muscle activity often fails to represent experimentally measured muscle activity from electromyographic (EMG) recordings. Research has theorized that the nervous system may simplify the range of possible activations used during dynamic tasks, by constraining activations to weighted groups of muscles, referred to as muscle synergies. Synergies are altered after neurological injury, such as stroke or cerebral palsy (CP), and may provide a method for improving subject-specific models of neuromuscular control.
The aim of this study was to test whether constraining simulation to synergies could improve estimated muscle activations compared to EMG data.
We evaluated modeled muscle activations during gait for six typically developing children (TD) and six children with CP. Muscle activations were estimated with: 1) static optimization (SO), minimizing muscle activations squared, and 2) synergy static optimization (SynSO), minimizing synergy activations squared using the weights identified from EMG data for 2-5 synergies.
While SynSO caused changes in estimated activations compared to SO, the correlation to EMG data was not higher in SynSO than SO for either TD or CP groups . The correlations to EMG were higher in CP than TD for both SO (CP: 0.48, TD: 0.36) and SynSO (CP: 0.46, TD: 0.26 for 5 synergies). Constraining activations to SynSO caused the simulated muscle stress to increase compared to SO for all individuals, causing a 157% increase with two synergies.
These results suggest that constraining simulated activations in inverse dynamic simulations to subject-specific synergies alone does not improve estimation of muscle activations during gait for generic musculoskeletal models.