Robotic assessment of sensorimotor and cognitive deficits in patients with epilepsy

Abstract

Individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) can present with significant cognitive impairments, such as impaired executive function, working memory, and declarative memory. Traditionally, these impairments are assessed using standard neuropsychological assessments; however these neuropsychological assessments typically only measure simple parameters, are extremely long and exhausting, and are overall expensive. We hoped to improve these problems by using robotic technology through the Kinarm robot. To identify if the Kinarm was a viable tool for assessing sensorimotor and cognitive skills, 23 subjects with TLE were recruited and underwent a brief neuropsychological and Kinarm assessment. Pearson correlations of scores from both assessments were conducted and demonstrated that scores from Kinarm tasks assessing neurocognitive domains known to be impaired in TLE, including executive function, working memory and declarative memory significantly correlated with similar tasks from the neuropsychological assessment. In addition to these findings, we investigated the effects of laterality on performance, with the hypothesis that left TLE would be more impaired on verbal memory tasks. However, our findings demonstrated no significant differences between the two lateralities in any of the tasks assessing this domain. Lastly, we investigated the effects of the duration of epilepsy on performance as deficits may be progressive. Linear regressions of the relationship between performance on all tasks and the duration of epilepsy demonstrated that individuals with TLE are increasingly more impaired with longer durations of epilepsy on a variety of tasks covering several neurocognitive domains. Overall, our findings demonstrated that the Kinarm is an effective tool for the assessment of impairments in people with TLE. Additionally, we demonstrated that longer durations of epilepsy are associated with increased impairment on a variety of neurocognitive domains.