Robotic Assessments of Hand Function in Patients With Parkinson's Disease

Summary

It has been shown that patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) have impaired kinaesthesia and haptic perception of the upper limbs. In PD patients, these impairments might be involved in the development of hypometria or bradykinesia and may play a role in postural deficits, thereby significantly contributing to the overall disability level.

Dedicated conventional or robot-assisted training might improve sensory-motor function in PD patients. In order to provide efficient robot-assisted therapy, robotic devices have to be able to tailor the therapy difficulty to the individual impairment profile of each patient. For difficulty adaptation in robot-assisted therapy, it is important to assess the impairment profiles with the same robotic platform that would be used for therapy, therefore minimizing costs or potential errors coming from the use of different devices. However, up to now, little emphasis has been placed on providing sensory-motor robot-assisted therapy for the upper limbs to persons with PD based on their individual level of impairment.

The aim of this study is therefore to evaluate if the assessments of sensory-motor hand function implemented on a robotic device for hand rehabilitation, i.e. the ReHapticKnob, are suitable to measure the impairments of kinaesthesia and haptic perception observed in subjects with Parkinson's disease.

If the assessments implemented in the ReHapticKnob are sensitive enough to detect a difference between the sensory-motor function of PD patients and healthy subjects, the device might in the future be used to assess improvements before and after sensory-motor therapy. This is a necessary step before the investigators can use these assessments to tailor the difficulty level of the therapy performed with the ReHapticKnob and to investigate the benefits and impact of such a therapy on the kinaesthetic and haptic impairments of persons with PD.

Conditions

• Parkinson Disease

Interventions

DEVICE

Assessments of the hand sensory function with the ReHapticKnob

During the assessment sessions with the ReHapticKnob, subjects sit comfortably on a chair in front of a screen and place the fingers of the hand on the handles of the device. The different assessments consist of moving the hand or forearm of the subjects to two different positions and asking the subject to discriminate between them (discrimination thresholds for the amplitude of grasping and forearm pronosupination positions), of passively moving the hand or forearm of the subject at low velocities and asking the subject to say when he/she detects the movement (detection thresholds for passive movements), or of rendering two objects with different stiffness and asking the subject to discriminate between them (discrimination thresholds for the stiffness of objects pinched with the hand).

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Clinica Hildebrand Brissago

  collaborator OTHER

• Neurocentro - Istituto di Neuroscienze Cliniche della Svizzera Italiana

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Daria Dinacci, Dr. med. · Clinica Hildebrand Centro di riabiliazione Brissago

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

OTHER

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

35 Years

Max Age

80 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2022-03-14

Primary Completion

2023-09-11

Completion

2023-09-12

Countries

• Switzerland

Study Locations