Correlation of Spatiotemporal and EMG Measures with Lower Extremity Fugl-Meyer Assessment Score in Post-Stroke Walking

Lower Extremity Fugl-Meyer Assessment (FMA-LE) is recommended as the primary outcome for assessing motor function in post-stroke population. However, the subjectivity, dependency on professional experience, and time-consuming visual inspection by healthcare professionals limit the use of FMA-LE in clinical practice. Contrarily to clinical scales, sensor-based assessments can automatically provide objective measurements of motor function. This work advances literature by evaluating the Spearman correlation between the FMA-LE clinical scores and both spatiotemporal and electromyographic (EMG) measures, acquired during different mobility walking tasks (self-selected speed, maximum speed, maximum cadence, maximum step length, and maximum step height). Data were extracted from ARRA dataset, including 27 post-stroke participants. The results showed that step length (0.44 ≤ r ≤ 0.60), stride time (−0.48 ≤ r ≤ −0.40), and cadence (0.40 ≤ r ≤ 0.46) spatiotemporal measures, and peak power frequency (PKF) EMG measure of gluteus medius (r = 0.42), lateral hamstring (0.40 ≤ r ≤ 0.46), and vastus medialis (0.42 ≤ r ≤ 0.45) muscles revealed significant strong correlations in multiple walking tasks. Overall, spatiotemporal measures presented higher correlations with FMA-LE than EMG measures. These findings are promising for future research to develop artificial intelligence methods to estimate the Lower FMA clinical scores for motor assessment, maximizing its use in clinical practice.