Deans' stroke musings: Next Generation Gamers: Computer Games Aid Recovery from Stroke

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Next Generation Gamers: Computer Games Aid Recovery from Stroke

I really doubt they have thought thru this. It is more likely that this is helping recovery from hemiparesis rather than paralysis. Once again no reproducible starting point for the research.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110515201320.htm

Computer games are not just for kids. New research published in Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, a BioMed Central open access journal, shows that computer games can speed up and improve a patient's recovery from paralysis? after a stroke.

It is often difficult for stroke victims to recover hand and arm movement, and 80-90% of sufferers still have problems six months later. Scientists in America looked at a group of people who had impaired use of one arm after a stroke and found that computer simulations and cutting edge techniques, used by the film industry to produce computer generated action, could restore lost function.

While many current training regimes concentrate on regaining hand and arm movement separately, the computer games and robotic training aids used in this trial attempted to simultaneously improve function of both together. The games Plasma Pong and Hammer Task were used to improve hand/arm coordination, accuracy and speed, while the Virtual Piano and Hummingbird Hunt simulations helped to restore precision of grip and individual finger motion.

After training for two-three hours a day for eight days, all of the patients showed increased control of hand and arm during reaching. They all had better stability of the damaged limb, and greater smoothness and efficiency of movement. Kinematic analysis showed that they also had improved control over their fingers and were quicker at all test tasks. In contrast their uninjured arm and the arms of control game players, who had normal hand/arm function, showed no significant improvement at all.

Dr Alma Merians said, "Patients who played these games showed an average improvement in their standard clinical scores of 20-22% over the eight days. These results show that computer games could be an important tool in the recovery of paralysed limbs after stroke."