Robotic tests for position sense and movement discrimination in the upper limb reveal that they each are highly reproducible but not correlated in healthy individuals.

All participants were healthy young adults, so the results do not show how the tests perform in people with stroke or other neurological injury. Only 21 people were tested, and they were all 18 to 22 years old, so the reliability estimates may not apply to other ages or to patient groups. The two repetitions were done on the same day, so this does not show whether the tests stay repeatable over longer periods. The task order was fixed, with position matching always done before movement discrimination, so practice, fatigue or inattention could have affected later performance. Healthy controls had low between-person variability, which can make reliability estimates different from those in patients with a wider range of performance. The study reports no treatment or clinical outcome, so it cannot show that using these tests improves patient care.

The funding and conflicts declaration names GlaxoSmithKline and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research as funders. The supplied text does not say that a sponsor designed the study or wrote the manuscript.

Do not conclude that one upper-limb proprioception test can replace another, or that these tests have been shown to work in patients. The study used 21 healthy young adults and found no significant relationship between movement discrimination and position matching.