Progress In Motor Control Effects Of Age Disorder And Rehabilitation

The authors explore recent progress in theoretical & experimental studies of motor control, from the perspective of practitioners who work with patients that have motor disorders. The text also develops new approaches to motor rehabilitation.

This single volume brings together both theoretical developments in the field of motor control and their translation into such fields as movement disorders, motor rehabilitation, robotics, prosthetics, brain-machine interface, and skill learning. Motor control has established itself as an area of scientific research characterized by a multi-disciplinary approach. Its goal is to promote cooperation and mutual understanding among researchers addressing different aspects of the complex phenomenon of motor coordination. Topics covered include recent theoretical advances from various fields, the neurophysiology of complex natural movements, the equilibrium-point hypothesis, motor learning of skilled behaviors, the effects of age, brain injury, or systemic disorders such as Parkinson's Disease, and brain-computer interfaces. The chapter ‘Encoding Temporal Features of Skilled Movements—What, Whether and How?’ is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

This book is the first to view the effects of development, aging, and practice on the control of human voluntary movement from a contemporary context. Emphasis is on the links between progress in basic motor control research and applied areas such as motor disorders and motor rehabilitation. Relevant to both professionals in the areas of motor control, movement disorders, and motor rehabilitation, and to students starting their careers in one of these actively developed areas.

Emerging and currently available technologies offer great promise for helping older adults, even those without serious disabilities, to live healthy, comfortable, and productive lives. What technologies offer the most potential benefit? What challenges must be overcome, what problems must be solved, for this promise to be fulfilled? How can federal agencies like the National Institute on Aging best use their resources to support the translation from laboratory findings to useful, marketable products and services? Technology for Adaptive Aging is the product of a workshop that brought together distinguished experts in aging research and in technology to discuss applications of technology to communication, education and learning, employment, health, living environments, and transportation for older adults. It includes all of the workshop papers and the report of the committee that organized the workshop. The committee report synthesizes and evaluates the points made in the workshop papers and recommends priorities for federal support of translational research in technology for older adults.

This ground-breaking book brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines to discuss the control and coordination of processes involved in perceptually guided actions. The research area of motor control has become an increasingly multidisciplinary undertaking. Understanding the acquisition and performance of voluntary movements in biological and artificial systems requires the integration of knowledge from a variety of disciplines from neurophysiology to biomechanics.

The main purpose of this third volume is to explore what the progress in theoretical and experimental studies of motor control can offer practitioners who work with patients with motor disorders. The text also develops new approaches to motor rehabilitation.

A decrease in motor ability can have a profound impact on a person's capacity to maintain independence. Motor skill levels decline with age and this can create difficulties for older adults as they attempt to maintain independent lives. The fact that people in today's society are living for much longer means that robust methods for examining movement in older adults, must be developed. These methods will increase our understanding of how movement deteriorates with age and inform approaches to rehabilitation in cases where movement is lost (e.g. motor paresis after stroke). Accordingly, this doctoral research used sophisticated kinematic technology to create a series of computerised visuomotor tasks designed to achieve the following primary aims (i) to examine specific questions regarding age differences in motor performance; (ii) to create an experimental task to measure and infer potential causes of age-related changes in motor learning; and (iii) use the motor learning task to assess the outcomes of tDCS in healthy younger and older adults. A secondary aim was to produce tests that have the potential for use in rehabilitative settings, where more sensitive methods of assessment are required. Chapter 1 reviews previous research on the topics of ageing, motor control, and rehabilitation, and identifies needs for further empirical investigation. Age differences in motor performance are examined in the experimental work of Chapters 2 and 3, which suggests that older people compensate for motor decline by making spatial and temporal adjustments to their movements in order to meet task demands - a finding that generalised between two different motor tasks. Chapter 4 considers performance differences between the preferred and non-preferred hand, and includes findings of a tracing study where manual asymmetries were reduced in older adults. The problems that can arise when measuring differences between the hands are, however, highlighted in the experimental work of Chapter 5. The research in Chapters 6 and 7 focuses on motor learning. In Chapter 6 a motor sequence learning task is developed, which was used to examine the relationship between motor performance and learning. This task paradigm was used again in Chapter 7, which begins by reviewing previous studies that have applied Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) to modify movement in healthy people and in stroke populations, and ends with two experiments that found no beneficial effects of tDCS on motor sequence learning in younger and older adults. Finally, Chapter 8 summarises the findings of each experimental chapter and considers future applications of the motor tasks designed throughout this doctoral work.