Adults living with cerebral palsy (CP) report bimanual and unimanual difficulties that interfere with their participation in activities of daily living (ADL). There is a lack of quantitative methods to assess the impact of these motor dysfunctions on the relative use of each arm. The objective of this study was to evaluate the concurrent and discriminative validity of accelerometry-based metrics when used to assess bimanual and unimanual functions.
Methods: A group of control subjects and hemiplegic adults living with CP performed six ADL tasks, during which they were wearing an Actigraph GT9X on each wrist and being filmed. Four bimanual and unimanual metrics were calculated from both accelerometry-based and video-based data; these metrics were then compared to one other with an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). Some of these metrics were previously validated in other clinical population, while others were novel. The discriminative validity was assessed through comparisons between groups and between tasks.
Results: The concurrent validity was considered as good to excellent (ICC = 0.61-0.97) depending on the experience of the raters. The tasks made it possible to discriminate between groups.
Conclusion: The proposed accelerometry-based metrics are a promising tool to evaluate bimanual and unimanual functions in adults living with CP.
Keywords: accelerometry; bimanual function; cerebral palsy; psychometric properties; unimanual function; upper limb.