There is a pressing need for strategies to slow or treat the progression of functional decline in people living with HIV. This paper explores a novel rehabilitation robotics approach to measuring cognitive and motor impairment in adults living with HIV, including a subset with stroke. We conducted a cross-sectional study with 21 subjects exhibiting varying levels of cognitive and motor impairment. We tested three robot-based tasks – trajectory tracking, N-back, and spatial span – to assess if metrics derived from these tasks were sensitive to differences in subjects with varying levels of executive function and upper limb motor impairments. We also examined how well these metrics could estimate clinical cognitive and motor scores. The results showed that the average sequence length on the robot-based spatial span task was the most sensitive to differences between various cognitive and motor impairment levels. We observed strong correlations between robot-based measures and clinical cognitive and motor assessments relevant to the HIV population, such as the Color Trails 1 ( rho = 0.83), Color Trails 2 ( rho = 0.71), Digit Symbol – Coding ( rho = 0.81), Montreal Cognitive Assessment – Executive Function subscore ( rho = 0.70), and Box and Block Test ( rho = 0.74). Importantly, our results highlight that gross motor impairment may be overlooked in the assessment of HIV-related disability. This study shows that rehabilitation robotics can be expanded to new populations beyond stroke, namely to people living with HIV and those with cognitive impairments.

中文翻译：

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基于机器人的HIV相关运动和认知障碍神经康复的评估

迫切需要制定战略来减缓或治疗艾滋病毒感染者的功能下降。本文探讨了一种新型的康复机器人技术，该方法可用于测量HIV感染者（包括脑卒中患者）的认知和运动障碍。我们对21名受试者进行了横断面研究，这些受试者表现出不同程度的认知和运动障碍。我们测试了三个基于机器人的任务-轨迹跟踪，N向后和空间跨度-以评估从这些任务得出的指标是否对执行功能和上肢运动障碍水平不同的受试者的差异敏感。我们还研究了这些指标可如何很好地估计临床认知和运动成绩。结果表明，基于机器人的空间跨度任务的平均序列长度对各种认知水平和运动障碍水平之间的差异最敏感。我们观察到以机器人为基础的措施与与HIV人群相关的临床认知和运动评估之间存在很强的相关性，例如Color Trails 1（ o = 0.83），色线2（ o = 0.71），数字符号-编码（ o = 0.81），蒙特利尔认知评估–执行功能分项（ o = 0.70）和盒装和盒式测试（ o= 0.74）。重要的是，我们的结果强调，在评估与HIV相关的残疾时，总运动障碍可能会被忽略。这项研究表明，康复机器人技术可以扩展到中风以外的新人群，即艾滋病病毒感染者和认知障碍者。