EVALUATING AND COMPARING THE RELIABILITY OF A KNEE JOINT POSITION AND VELOCITY PERCEPTION ASSESSMENT PROTOCOL

K. Tsoukalas¹, I. Maliousis¹, A. Kellari¹, Z. Dimitriadis¹, E. Kapreli¹, N. Strimpakos¹, I. Poulis¹, A. K. Kanellopoulos¹

¹University of Thessaly, Physiotherapy Department, Lamia, Greece

Background: Proprioception describes the perception of movement and position of limbs and body in space. As proprioception plays a crucial role in sensorimotor control, various assessment tests have been documented, with the knee joint position sense to be one of the most common. Although joint angular velocity sense is a component of the proprioceptive senses, it remains the least studied sub-modality of proprioception, and data published for its assessment are still limited. Therefore, any difference may exist between the proprioceptive perception of joint position and joint angular velocity, or any synergy between them, have not yet been documented.

Purpose: The development and reliability investigation of a novel assessment protocol for the knee angular velocity sense, and the comparison of its proprioceptive perception with that of the knee joint position sense.

Methods: Forty-one healthy subjects (23 women and 18 men) with mean age of 20.7 (SD±2.9) years participated in the study. Reliability measures included intra-rater, inter-rater and test-retest reliability for all of the following tests: a) joint position sense (JPS) with a target angle of 45°, b) velocity replication (VR) with a target of 10°/s angular velocity, and c) dynamic position sense (DPS) with targets of 10°/s angular velocity and 45° joint position. All data were collected with the isokinetic dynamometer Biodex 3 Pro, and both assessors and participants were blinded regarding their recordings.

Results: In all the measurements, JPS test exhibited low reliability scores [ICC=0.21-0.59, SEM=1.45-2.92, SDD=4.02-8.10], VR test showed significantly higher reliability [ICC=0.64-0.81, SEM=1.07-1.40, SDD=2.97-3.88], while in DPS test, the velocity component presented again better scores of reliability than the JPS one [ICC=0.62-0.79, SEM=0.70-1.04, SDD=1.94-2.88, against [ICC=0.04-0.75, SEM=2.44-4.08, SDD=6.76-11.31].

Conclusions: Tests for knee joint, using same subjects and equipment, showed significantly higher reliability rates in angular velocity sense than in the JPS. This may indicate the ability of healthy participants to reproduce velocity more consistently than position, and highlights the importance of angular velocity sense, as it may play a more significant role in sensorimotor control than the perception of joint position.

Implications: The presented protocol may provide a useful tool for the future study of a bunch of pathologies, where deficits of proprioceptive component of angular velocity sense may be involved, which could have a serious impact in both rehabilitation strategies and motor control research.

Funding acknowledgements: This research received no specific grant. The authors would like to thank the subjects for their participation.

Keywords:
Proprioception
Velocity sense
Reliability

Topics:
Musculoskeletal
Musculoskeletal: lower limb
Neurology

Did this work require ethics approval? Yes

Institution: University of Thessaly

Committee: The University of Thessaly’s Human Ethics Committee

Ethics number: 649,651-8/9/2021