November 5, 2026

Stroke recovery tracked with wearable device

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Wrist-worn devices can provide useful information about people’s ability to use their arms during stroke rehab.

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After a stroke, people may have trouble moving their arms. Trained specialists use clinical tests to track whether physical therapy is helping a patient recover that ability. However, those tests are time-consuming and often cannot detect small changes in how people move. They also don’t capture how people use their arms in everyday life.

Wearable devices may offer faster and more sensitive recovery tracking. But so far, those devices have only been able to collect basic information about movement.

A team of NIH-funded researchers led by Dr. Sunghoon Lee of the University of Massachusetts Amherst created a new wearable tool for tracking how patients recovered the ability to use their arms after a stroke. Their results were published in Science Translational Medicine on September 30, 2026.

The researchers created the digital arm performance scale (DAPS) using two sets of data. One set was collected using specific clinical tests that assess participants’ arm function. The other set came from monitoring the participants’ arm movements during everyday life.

Sixty-one people who had experienced a stroke within six months of the study participated in the data collection. These participants and 75 healthy people wore accelerometers on their wrists for thousands of hours in total. These devices measured the affected arms’ movement in three dimensions.

The researchers used machine learning to detect patterns in the data. This enabled DAPS to relate participants’ everyday arm movements to their performance on clinical tests.

Among the stroke patients whose data was used to create DAPS, the tool tracked improvements in arm movement as well as the clinical tests did. DAPS was similarly useful for tracking the recovery of 79 other patients who had a stroke more than six months before the study.

Using only data about everyday arm movements, DAPS could separate healthy people from those recovering from a stroke. It could even distinguish patients who achieved the highest possible score on clinical tests from people who never had a stroke. This suggests DAPS can pick up on very small differences in how people move.

The researchers also simulated how using DAPS might have affected two previous clinical trials of stroke recovery treatments. They found DAPS required far fewer trial participants to figure out whether the treatments worked.

The findings suggest that DAPS can accurately track how patients recover the ability to use their arms. This could be useful to patients and clinicians alike during stroke rehabilitation.

“Currently, clinicians aren’t able to frequently assess if patients are responding to the prescribed exercises, and patients have no way of knowing how they are progressing,” Lee says.

He adds that the real-time data DAPS collects could help with personalizing treatments and speed up the development of new therapies.

—by Brandon Levy

Related Links

• Sound waves stimulate stroke recovery in mice
• Movement after paralysis
• Stroke patients may benefit from brain stimulation
• Spinal cord stimulation improves arm, hand movements after stroke
• Critical time window for rehabilitation after a stroke
• Boosting stroke recovery
• NIH stroke scale
• Stroke (FDA)

References

Assessment of upper-limb motor recovery after stroke using a wrist-worn accelerometer digital biomarker. Wang R, Lang CE, Stoykov ME, Bonato P, Lee SI. Sci Transl Med. 2026 Sep 30;18(869):eadw3644. doi: 10.1126/scitranslmed.adw3644. Epub 2026 Sep 30. PMID: 42814801.

Funding

NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), and National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB); National Science Foundation.