Study limitations
The patients and the therapist were unblinded during the therapy. We did not include a group that underwent FES only. However, the data from the MN SEP can be considered compensation from our point of view. Moreover, we had healthy volunteers to minimise this bias. We evaluated outcomes only up to week 4 after the intervention; thus, long-term outcomes are still needed to substantiate our results further. We cannot exclude the possibility of selection bias because we used strength inclusion criteria. High technical performance in carrying out SEP measurements and evaluations is necessary to interpret variability in pathological cortical peaks. Even though clinical experts were masked to participants’ clinical information, additional patient data would reduce the bias caused by manual cortical peaks cursor adjustment.