The patient pictured above is playing a game on Microsoft Kinect where she’s paddling and steering down a river, swatting bats inside a cave, grabbing things out of the river and catching parachutes of supplies. She’s had a stroke and, as a result, has impaired motor function in her right hand.
The game she’s playing was developed by a team of clinicians, computer scientists, an electrical engineer and a biomechanist at Ohio State University as a way to bring costly constraint-induced movement therapy into a stroke survivor’s home.
Last year, the team led by neuroscientist Lynne Gauthier was granted $653,000 from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to develop the game. Now they’re testing it in patients. In an update issued by the university, Gauthier said individuals have shown gains in motor speed comparable to traditional CI therapy.
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“Patients have reported they have more motivation, time goes by quicker and the challenges are exciting and not so tedious,” she said.
Participants in the study play the game for 30 hours over a period of two weeks. On the hand that’s been more affected by the stroke, they wear a glove embedded with sensors that control the game. On the other, less affected hand, they wear a mitt, to keep them focused on using the more affected hand.
The game, designed to retain the fundamental principles of CI therapy, guides them through a river canyon environment, where they perform a number of movements targeting the affected hand and arm.
In standard stroke rehabilitation, Gauthier told me in an interview last year, patients only get a few hours of therapy each week and tend to develop what’s known as “nonuse,” in which they avoid using the affected arm because it’s clumsy and awkward.
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Although CI therapy has been shown to improve upper extremity function in patients shortly after stroke and after time has passed, fewer than 1 percent of them get it because of a lack of access, transportation issues and high costs, she said.
If the OSU team’s game demonstrates sufficient efficacy in stroke, they say it could have future applications for patients with traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy and multiple sclerosis as well.
[Images courtesy of Ohio State University]