Novel Measures of Similarity and Asymmetry in Upper Limb Activities for Identifying Hemiparetic Severity in Stroke Survivors

Abstract

Stroke survivors are often characterized by hemiparesis, i.e., paralysis in one half of the body, severely affecting upper limb movements. Monitoring the progression of hemiparesis requires manual observation of limb movements at regular intervals, and hence is a labour intensive process. In this work, we use wrist-worn accelerometers for automated assessment of hemiparesis in acute stroke. We propose novel measures of similarity and asymmetry in hand activities through bivariate Poincaré analysis between two-hand accelerometer data for quantifying hemiparetic severity. The proposed descriptors characterize the distribution of activity surrogates derived from acceleration of the two hands, o..