What is the importance of proper biometric data in recovery?
With Dr. Nick Housley 18th Sep, 21Transcript
What is the importance of proper biometric data in recovery?
The proper biometric data is important because it detects even the slightest improvement in your movement and helps you to accelerate stroke recovery. Further, robotic devices and games can give the biometric data of stroke patients.
Biofeedback in stroke recovery
The biofeedback (what you see and feel) in stroke recovery may not be integrated correctly or misinterpreted in some cases. For instance, the significant pain secondary to movement. Those normal sensations can be misinterpreted in any event when we make poor judgment and rely on vision only.
Nonetheless, we often find ourselves looking at our limbs to get the feedback; that we can receive without looking at them. We get it from those endogenous or internal sources, but biofeedback from the robotics or gaming interface is more accurate; because it is a surrogate for your movements.
Importance of proper biometric data in recovery
Whenever you use robotic devices for checking your progress, it gives you more accurate results because of proper biometric data. Thus, when you do up and down motion, that is directly proportional to the movements you see on the screen.
Furthermore, Neuroplasticity in terms of stroke recovery is the idea of improving your motoric capabilities, your strength, and range of motion. But we often forget that sensations are crucial for the smoother recruitment of the smooth adjustments of motor patterns. It is not something that you move to execute a given task; it is also the feedback that tells you whether or not you did the thing right.
For instance, if you are playing the piano, did you hit the actual notes, or cutting a piece of bread, did you make it all the way through. All the feedback is critical. One thing that often goes under-appreciated is that those sensory systems that integrate those sensory networks also can adapt and be modified. And it just takes time to relearn a skill.
For that, you have to simultaneously give time and provide the sensory challenge or sensory challenge stimuli if you will drive change in those sensory networks. Over time, you will not be reliant on the gaming, the challenge (built into each of the different game modes), and the sophistication (that goes into the complexity).
How was progress measured when there were no devices to acquire proper biometric data?
In the past, there were no games to quantify the muscle activity of patients in stroke recovery but only simple devices that show progress with a line. That line would go up or down with more or less activity. Therefore, the patient was trained to hit or get below a target for trying to increase or decrease the activity. And what patients so often did is that they were very much dependent upon looking at their limb as a surrogate for a game.
Further, they did not have any games and needed to look at the screen. Thus, the best-performing patients seem to be the ones who need to spend less time looking at their limbs because they were getting the information they needed from the feedback that allowed them to internalize the signals. So they were not dependent upon having to explore their limbs as much.
Moreover, they did it much more freely, and when asked, “You are doing much better, but why are you doing it so much?”. They used to say that they had a feeling that they could move limbs. What they mean is that they are taking these visual signals and then internalizing the changes that are necessary for the muscles across the joints to move more successfully. So it is this whole idea of reacquiring control where you internalize the signals.
Conclusion
To wrap it up, one can say that stroke patients may misinterpret the visual feedback, and they may not get a correct idea of actual progress. Therefore, the proper biometric data using robotic devices and games can give stroke survivors authentic progress in their functional abilities.