Cognitive fatigue effect on rehabilitation task performance in a haptic virtual environment system

INTRODUCTION: This paper presents a study on an affordable rehabilitation approach to post-stroke patients. In this approach, a patient performs a task on a haptic virtual environment system and a physician examines the patient’s task remotely based on the performing data. OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study is to test a hypothesis that an elevated cognitive fatigue state may significantly affect the patient’s task performance so as to disturb judgment by physicians. METHODS: The study included the development of a test-bed for the experiment and an experimental study for the hypothesis. The study took the wrist coordination function of the upper limb as an example. RESULT: The study showed that the cognitive fatigue state has a significant influence on the patient’s task performance; in other words, there is a noise (75% discrepancy from the true performance information) in the performance data. CONCLUSION: The study provides great potential for accurate assessment of the functional state from true patient task performance. The future work needs to focus on the removal of the noise. The limitation of this study is that the experiment was carried out on healthy subjects, although post-stroke patients are more susceptible to an elevated cognitive fatigue state from a common sense.