Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Therapists’ thoughts on Gaming and Social Media

Qualitative Study

Therapist’s Perceptions of Social Media and Video Game Technologies in Upper Limb Rehabilitation

Tatla, S. K., Shirzad, N., Lohse, K. R., Virji-Babul, N., Hoens, A. M., Holsti, L., Li, L. C., Miller, K. J., Lam, M. Y. & Van der Loos, H. M.

JMIR Serious Games, 2015 3 (1):e2 DOI: 10.2196/games.3401
PMID: 25759148

Full content*: games.jmir.org/2015/1/e2

Objective: The objective of (this) study was to explore therapists’ perceptions of how young people and adults with hemiplegia use gaming and social media technologies in daily life and in rehabilitation, and to identify barriers to using these technologies in rehabilitation.

Method: A purposive sample of occupational and physical therapists was gathered for two focus group sessions. Participants were guided through a semi-structured interview with open questions. The content was audio recorded and transcribed. Coding allowed themes to emerge; participants were involved in affirming the findings.

Findings: The authors identified three themes relating to social media and gaming technologies: the presence or uptake in the lives of rehabilitation clients; barriers to use in therapy, and possible benefits. Clients varied in their use of social media and gaming technologies, and therapists also made limited use of these. Barriers to use included age appropriateness, the therapists’ concern with client’s privacy, questionable transferability of skills, lack of accessibility, and “reconciling (the) therapist role within the gaming context”. Benefits included the social-emotional, rehabilitation and usability features of social media and videogaming.

Examined through the lens of Diffusion of Innovation Theory, barriers to uptake included “increased complexity, limited relative advantage, perceived lack of compatibility with values of some clients and therapists’ reconciling compatibility with their values”. Facilitators of uptake included “motivation, trialability, social connection as key benefit, and perceived compatibility with values of some clients”.


*This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR Serious Games, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://games.jmir.org, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.

Friday, March 13, 2015

Remapping the Brain with Videogames

Review

Should we integrate video games into home-based rehabilitation therapies for cerebral palsy? Biddess, E. Future Neurology 2012;7 (5) 515-518

For full text Google: “Should we integrate video games into home-based rehabilitation therapies for cerebral palsy?”

Summary: This article reviews the effectiveness of video games on neuroplasticity. Two articles are cited, each using specialized gaming systems and showed neural changes related to specific neurological goals. You et al.(1) found “cortical reorganization following a 4 week intervention with an 8 year old child with hemiparetic CP who engaged in videogame play for 60 min durations, 5 times a week.” Goloumb et al.(2) showed “improved functional scores and altered cortical activation profiles during a grasp tasks in a study fo three adolescents with hemiplegic CP who participated in videogame play for 30 min per days, 5 days a week over a three month period.”

Other trends noted with video games used in therapeutic environments are that games that allow a latitude of movement variability typically would diminish therapeutic benefits, that games typically offer limited possibilities of movement regimes that fit with therapeutic goals, and that in-game feedback and rewards are not always sufficient to motivate the player to persist to the level of therapeutic benefits.

  1. You SH, Jang SH, Kim Y, Kwon Y, Barrow I, Hallett M. Cortical reorganization induced by virtual reality therapy in a child with hemiparetic CP. Dev. Med. Child Neurol.47,628–635 (2005).
  2. Golomb MR, McDonald B, Warden S et al. In-home virtual reality videogame telerehabilitation in adolescents with hemiplegic CP. Arch. Phys. Med. Rehabil.91,1–7 (2010).