Abstract
Proprioception is fundamental for maintaining balance and moving-hence for daily living. As proprioception deficits may occur with aging, neurological and musculoskeletal (especially cervical) conditions, assessment of proprioception can be relevant for a very large cohort of individuals.
We designed a web page that allows measuring the neck joint position sense while sitting in front of a standard webcam. The web page tracks the subjects’ head movement and instructs them on how to perform a head repositioning accuracy protocol. We performed a test retest analysis of this tool in order to assess its feasibility and reliability. Eleven healthy subjects participated in two sessions over consecutive days, at their homes. We calculated average errors across four directions Bland-Altman level of agreement between the measurements on the two sessions.
All participants could complete the test in approximately six minutes. The average absolute error did not differ between the two sessions, showing close to zero bias and a 95% limit of agreement of 1.676°. These values changed significantly across directions, suggesting that the performance of the head tracking software for neck flexion movements may be limited.
By comparing our results with normative values, we suggest that the narrow limit of agreement we observed makes the web page potentially capable of distinguishing healthy subjects from subjects with proprioceptive deficit in the neck joint.
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Basteris, A., Tornbjerg, C.E., Leth, F.B., Wiil, U.K. (2021). A Home-Based Self-administered Assessment of Neck Proprioception. In: Ye, J., O'Grady, M.J., Civitarese, G., Yordanova, K. (eds) Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare. MobiHealth 2020. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 362. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70569-5_9
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