Perspectives of stroke survivors and informal caregivers on home-based mental practice for upper limb recovery after stroke: a qualitative co-design study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this qualitative study, we explored the views of stroke survivors and informal caregivers regarding three types of mental practice for upper limb recovery: (1) action observation (AO); (2) motor imagery (MI); and (3) combined action observation and motor imagery (AO + MI). Semi-structured interviews and focus groups were conducted between December 2021 and October 2022 with 23 participants (13 caregivers and 10 stroke survivors).Thematic analysis generated three higher-order themes: (1) Mental practice: understanding and recent experience. Although comprehension of AO, MI, and AO + MI varied, participants could provide clear, jargon-free explanations of these methods. (2) Feasibility of home-based training. Caregivers often felt overburdened, confused, and unsupported in home-based care but considered mental practice education useful for rehabilitation. (3) User perspectives on a digital prototype (Webapp). Participants viewed the WebApp interface as overly text-heavy and recommended a more visually engaging design. This study provides new insights into stroke survivors’ and caregivers’ understanding and perceptions of mental practice and highlights the potential of co-designed digital resources to enhance engagement and support home-based rehabilitation. These findings will inform the iterative refinement of mental practice materials for future feasibility and acceptability testing in chronic stroke survivors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".