Inducing Cognition of Secure Grasp and Agency to Accelerate Motor Rehabilitation from an Instrumented Glove

Improving grasp performance for activities of daily living is an essential objective following neuromuscular trauma such as spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, stroke or amputations. Traditional rehabilitation methods involve intensive or repetitive physical training to relearn motor skills. Few of them consider or leverage cognitive factors to better motivate and engage individuals during training. Novel cognitive-based approaches could better motivate individuals to engage in training paradigms and facilitate rehabilitation procedure. Sense of agency (agency) is the neural perception of the true authorship of a neuromuscular action and its related consequence. Possessing greater agency as a basis for improved functional performance appears as an intuitive concept since the higher agency one has, the better movement control one perceives. In this project, we developed an instrumented glove that aimed to predict secure grasping and to improve grasp performance with onboard sensory feedback by inducing agency. Participants received visual and audio feedback during a training session across three distinct conditions: 'Decay feedback', 'Instant feedback' and 'No feedback'. Overall, grasp performance including completion time and pathlength significantly improved (p < 0.05) after the training with 'Decay feedback', comparing to training without feedback (i.e. 'No feedback'). The results of this study may foster user-device integration at a cognitive level and facilitate greater clinical retention for rehabilitation following neurotrauma.