Examination of robotically collected reach to place kinematics in persons with subacute and chronic stroke

Three groups of subjects were trained using a robot assisted virtual rehabilitation system designed to improve motor function in persons with upper extremity paresis due to stroke. The first group initiated training in the first month after stroke. The second started a month later and the third started training at least 12 months after stroke. The two early groups demonstrated improvements in a clinical measure of motor recovery. Only the early training group's changes were clinically meaningful. We measured training kinematics collected during a robotic reaching task and identified two different patterns of improvement, suggesting that improvements in reaching performance may have been related to improvements in motor recovery in the early training group, and that the robust reaching performance improvements made by the group of subjects with chronic stroke may have been due to the development of effective compensatory strategies or task learning.