Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation

duplicate articles between databases and articles which did not meet the following inclusion criteria: Human subjects Adult subjects (age 19 or older) Article written or translated to English Peer-reviewed Full-text available to authors Article included subjects with lower extremity amputation Article included results of an exercise testing modality Article titles and abstracts were then reviewed and ar- ticles eliminated for relevance to the topic which was reporting the results of amputee subjects performing at least one exercise testing modality which was related to some other aspect of prosthetic rehabilitation. Full-text evaluations of the remaining articles were performed to determine final eligibility for the review. A further inclu- sion criteria for the clinical practice guideline (CPG) was direct applicability, meaning the articles utilizing solely able-bodied individuals as subjects were eliminated. Included articles were aggregated and descriptive sta- tistics were calculated for sociodemographic data as ap- propriate. Common outcome variables reported in exercise testing manuscripts were also identified and similarly analyzed. These variables were heart rate (HR), oxygen consumption (VO 2 ), %VO 2max , and maximum workload achieved during the testing protocol. Quality assessment Manuscripts were assessed for quality using the critical appraisal tool outlined in the United Kingdom National Service Framework for Long-Term Conditions (UK NSF) [ 14 ] . This metric was developed by a UK Depart- ment of Health initiative in March 2005. This tool was selected as it has been used to develop clinical practice guidelines and is the preferred tool for the medical asso- ciation of a developed, first-world country where no equivalent tool has been developed in the United States. The UK-NSF tool also allows for evaluation of a range of research types from case studies to meta-analyses, syn- thesis of empirical evidence statements (EESs), and grad- ing of those statements for use in a clinical practice recommendation. The UK-NSF assesses design, applic- ability, and quality of the articles with quality being scored based on five questions: 1. Are the research questions/aims and design clearly stated? 2. Is the research design appropriate for the aims and objectives of the research? Fig. 1 Heirarchy of research designs & levels of scientific evidence Klenow et al. Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation 2018, 15 (Suppl 1):64 Page 13 of 72