# Effect of Kinesio Taping on Hand Sensorimotor Control and Brain Activity
## 4 Discussion  
The main finding of our study is that Kinesio taping applied on the skin above the wrist/finger flexor muscles can improve the joint proprioceptive sense in healthy adults with poor joint proprioception. This study is also the first to report the effects of Kinesio taping on cortical activities. We observed that responders (participants with increased EEG beta power under the taping conditions) significantly improved in terms of the accuracy of force control under the taping conditions. Muscle spindles and cutaneous receptors contributed to joint proprioceptive sensing [29, 30, 31]. Kinesio taping can be used as a form of tactile stimulation to overcome the attenuation of muscle activities following prolonged vibration [19], potentially due to the activation of gamma motor neurons and enhanced sensory afferent input (muscle spindle). Similar to previous observations [7], our study demonstrated the positive effects of Kinesio taping on joint proprioception. However, unlike our study, a previous study [32] did not \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c} \hline \hline  & **Control** & **TapingN** & **Taping20** & \(p\) **Value** \\ \hline PCA-alpha & 0.13 (0.05) & 0.13 (0.06) & 0.12 (0.056) & 0.325 \\ \hline PCA-beta & 0.29 (0.093) & 0.30 (0.06) & 0.31 (0.06) & 0.137 \\ \hline PCA-gamma & 0.24 (0.16) & 0.21 (0.10) & 0.23 (0.10) & 0.685 \\ \hline C3-alpha & 0.14 (0.07) & 0.14 (0.06) & 0.12 (0.06) & 0.610 \\ \hline C3-beta & 0.29 (0.05) & 0.31 (0.08) & 0.30 (0.06) & 0.303 \\ \hline C3-gamma & 0.21 (0.10) & 0.20 (0.10) & 0.24 (0.11) & 0.298 \\ \hline CMC-alpha & 0.04 (0.07) & 0.03 (0.06) & 0.06 (0.15) & 0.864 \\ \hline CMC-beta & 0.21 (0.21) & 0.20 (0.20) & 0.27 (0.29) & 0.727 \\ \hline CMC-gamma & 0.20 (0.19) & 0.29 (0.28) & 0.29 (0.28) & 0.295 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 2: EEG and corticomuscular coherence values for the three different taping conditions. Figure 3: (**A**) Change of force accuracy error had a negative moderate correlation with change of beta power in the tapingN condition. (**B**) The responders showed less force accuracy error (mean \(\pm\) standard deviation) under the tapingN condition. * indicates significant difference between conditions (\(p\) < 0.05). observe joint proprioceptive sense improvement with Kinesio taping. This discrepancy could be due to participants' joint proprioceptive performances between the previous and current study. The joint angle errors of the patients in the study by [PERSON] et al. are quite small (1.8\({}^{\circ}\)) compared with that in the current study (3.1\({}^{\circ}\)). Our subgroup analysis revealed that Kinesio taping with neutral tension and 20% additional tension were both effective for individuals with a poorer joint proprioceptive sense, reducing joint angle by approximately 2\({}^{\circ}\). Our findings were similar to a previous observation of patients with knee arthritis [33] and thus indicate that Kinesio taping is a suitable clinical alternative for improving the joint proprioceptive sense. Previous studies have investigated the effects of Kinesio taping on the force proprioceptive sense. After applying Kinesio taping with 20-30% additional tension, the grip force proprioception of healthy participants and patients with \"golfer's elbow\" could be significantly improved [8; 9; 34]. However, our results indicated that Kinesio taping with neutral or 20% additional tension did not improve grip force proprioception. Similar to the joint proprioceptive sense discussed above, we think participants' proprioceptive performances played an important role in these inconsistent findings. The averaged grip force errors were approximately 3 kg for previous studies. In contrast, our participants had relatively small force sense errors, at 1.5 kg. Among our participants, three of them had poorer grip force perception (average force sense error 3 kg).