## 1 Introduction  
Stroke is the second-leading global cause of death behind heart disease, accounting for 11% of total deaths worldwide [1]. Approximately 50% of stroke survivors suffer reduced mobility due to paralysis in a lower limb [1]. Individuals with post-stroke hemiparesis, who exhibit asymmetrical muscle activation, reduced motor control, combined with metabolic and structural changes within the skeletal muscle, also tend to have a decline in balance and ambulation capacity [2]. Pedalling-based therapy, which generates cyclic and symmetric power output without the requirement of balance maintenance, has been shown to improve patient aerobic capacity [3; 4], ambulatory balance, and motor performance in stroke patients [5; 6]. It can be performed in the home while seated and without lower limb weight bearing, and is considered a safe alternative to walking in subjects with postural instability and fall risk [3; 7]. The repetitive nature of pedalling-based exercise therapy on a stationary bicycle has been associated with poor motivation, low compliance, and lack of perceived self-efficacy, which are key barriers to the use of pedalling in rehabilitation [8]. The use of real-time measurement and display of exercise performance during cycling, including power, speed, speed variability, distance, and duration of the exercise, has been shown to increase exercise motivation and compliance in stroke patients [7; 9; 10; 11]. Furthermore, real-time visual feedback on the work completed by the lower limbs during pedalling has been attributed to reduced limb-to-limb pedalling imbalance and increased pedalling speed in chronic stroke patients, resulting in a higher gait speed and reduced gait asymmetry [12]. At present, however, the influence of real-time biofeedback of cadence control at different speeds, which may ultimately influence the effectiveness of pedalling-based therapy, remains poorly understood. The use of video and music during exercise therapy has been shown to distract from the physical discomfort of exertion [13; 14; 15], acting as a dissociative attentional stimuli, which may lower the perceived exertion and improve exercise performance [16; 17; 18]. [PERSON] et al. (1998) demonstrated that pedalling while watching a prerecorded video in healthy individuals contributed to higher peak pedalling speeds for a given blood lactate level compared to pedalling without video interaction [19], while [PERSON] et al. (2003), in a cohort of healthy women, showed that video and music stimulus while pedalling improved peak speed and the overall distance pedalled [20]. While there is evidence of the role of feedback and video engagement on cardiovascular performance in healthy individuals, including eliciting peak performance and extending time to exhaustion [21], the ability for video engagement to improve exercise performance and motivation in stroke patients has not been demonstrated to date. Stroke survivors that present with motor impairments have a characteristically lower ventilatory threshold and reduced muscle strength [22; 23], which may compromise capacity to achieve targeted pedalling goals, even in those affected by the most mild lower limb functional impairments [24]. Cognitive impairment and attention deficits may pose a further challenge to stroke survivors attempting to leverage the benefits of video-based feedback and engagement during exercise [25; 26]. The objective of this study was to evaluate the influence of a novel video-based engagement regime for pedalling in stroke patients, one that required subjects to actively pedal in order to control the play rate of a prerecorded video. The specific aims were: first, to evaluate the capacity of this exercise regime to influence cadence control and the perceived motivation and enjoyment in both stroke patients and healthy controls during pedalling at different speeds; and second, to compare these findings to the cases of pedalling with cadence performance feedback only, as well as pedalling with no feedback or engagement.