A Review of Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy to Study Motor Function in Patients with Traumatic Brain Injury

This paper examines the use of functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to study motor function in patients affected with traumatic brain injury (TBI). We explore moderate to severe TBI (Galgano et al., 2017), an injury negatively affecting and impacting a person's ability to perform regular and familiar tasks. TBI significantly affects motor function, primarily speech and movement. The purpose of this review is to provide an analysis of various studies, summarize important information, determine whether results from similar studies using different fNIRS methods show consistent results, explain discrepancies in the data, and learn from the common limitations found while studying motor impairment in patients with TBI, with the help of fNIRS.