Join us for our upcoming STEM Bytes Seminar on Tuesday, February 6 from 9:30 – 10:00 am PT on Zoom!

To register for this seminar, please visit: tinyurl.com/STEM-Bytes2-6

Speaker:

🎤 Nathan Dennler, PhD Student in Computer Science

Nathan is a 5th year Ph.D. Student in the Computer Science department at USC, advised by Stefanos Nikolaidis and Maja Mataric. They focus on designing systems and algorithms that can allow robots to adapt to their users. Apart from their research, Nathan is active in the whacking dance community in Los Angeles and likes sewing and figure skating.

Talk: Assessing Nonuse in Post-Stroke Individuals Using a Robot

An overreliance on the less-affected limb for functional tasks at the expense of the paretic limb and in spite of recovered capacity is an often-observed phenomenon in survivors of hemispheric stroke. The difference between capacity for use and actual spontaneous use is referred to as arm nonuse. Obtaining an ecologically valid evaluation of arm nonuse is challenging because it requires the observation of spontaneous arm choice for different tasks, which can easily be influenced by instructions, presumed expectations, and awareness that one is being tested. To better quantify arm nonuse, we developed the bimanual arm reaching test with a robot (BARTR) for quantitatively assessing arm nonuse in chronic stroke survivors. The BARTR is an instrument that uses a robot arm as a means of remote and unbiased data collection of nuanced spatial data for clinical evaluations of arm nonuse. This approach shows promise for determining the efficacy of interventions designed to reduce paretic arm nonuse and enhance functional recovery after stroke. We show that the BARTR satisfies the criteria of an appropriate metric for neurorehabilitative contexts: It is valid, reliable, and simple to use.

𝙉𝙤𝙩𝙚: 𝙏𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙞𝙨 𝙤𝙥𝙚𝙣 𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙐𝙎𝘾 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙪𝙣𝙞𝙩𝙮