Stroke is the most common cause of complex adult disability in high-income countries [1]. Loss of arm function affects 69% of people who have a stroke [2]. Only 12% of people with arm weakness at the onset of stroke make a full recovery [3]. Improving arm function has been identified as a research priority by stroke survivors, carers, and health professionals who report that current rehabilitation pays insufficient attention to arm recovery [4].~Robot-assisted training enables a greater number of repetitive tasks to be practiced in a consistent and controllable manner. Repetitive task training is known to drive Hebbian plasticity, where the wiring of pathways that are coincidently active is strengthened [5, 6]. A dose of greater than 20 h of repetitive task training improves upper limb motor recovery following a stroke [7] and, therefore, robot-assisted training has the potential to improve arm motor recovery after stroke. We anticipate that Hebbian neuroplasticity, which is learning dependent, will operate regardless of the post-stroke phase. We, hereby, describe the protocol for a multicentre randomized controlled trial to determine whether robot-assisted training improves upper limb function following a stroke in the sub-acute stage.
Loss of arm function is a common and distressing consequence of stroke. Neurotechnology-aided rehabilitation could be a promising approach to accelerate the recovery of upper limb functional impairments. This multicentre randomized controlled trial is aimed at assessing the efficacy of robot-assisted upper limb rehabilitation in subjects with sub-acute stroke following a stroke, compared to the traditional upper limb rehabilitation.