Persons with Functional Movement Disorder (FMD) have symptoms of uncontrollable body movements that can range from small tremors to large jerks. The involuntary and unpredictable nature of these symptoms can impede a person’s independence, quality of life, and sense of self. Fortunately, treatment does exist and typically takes the form of an intensive, multidisciplinary approach to therapy, including physical, occupational, and behavioral therapies. Garrett Weidig from Dr. Bush’s lab along with collaborators at The Recovery Project in Lansing have focused on quantifying the effectiveness of this treatment, centering around movement quality. A state-of-the-art motion capture system was used to collect position data on FMD participants pre- and post-treatment as well as a healthy control during upper-extremity-centric tasks. Analysis was conducted to obtain the velocity profile, which was used to describe movement quality. The figure shows a characteristic healthy velocity profile (gray) and the same FMD participant pre- and post-treatment (blue) during a simulated drinking task. For this individual and for the FMD cohort in general, our findings suggest that treatment intervention significantly increases the movement quality of persons with FMD, regardless of their initial symptom severity. We believe that this information will be vital for both clinicians and patients to better understand and track symptom progression for a population whose symptoms can be difficult to objectively quantify.
