Motivation through Inclusion of Failure in Stroke Rehabilitation

A new way of looking at rehab. If parents protected and prevented their newborns from ever falling while learning to walk they may never learn.
Another dissertation, better than most professionals.
Failure +1 more try.
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The environment created by classic physical therapy for locomotion used with patients recovering from stroke is often one of overprotection, which has been shown to have a significant negative effect on patient motivation. Fall-based therapy, by contrast, uses a robot to allow patients to experience failure at walking tasks without risking physical injury that results from falls. The inclusion of this option for Non-Harmful Failure in the walking tasks within the rehabilitation environment may increase the motivation of individuals participating in the therapy over the increases seen in classic physical therapy, leading to greater rehabilitative success. By allowing for a non-harmful failure, Fall-Based therapy dissipates the overprotection of classic therapy, removing a strong negative influence on patient motivation, and should result in a significant increase in patient motivation to participate and complete physical therapy.
This study sought to examine the literature on motivation of participants while also cataloging their experiences during the study through quantitative and qualitative measures. Participants completed a survey, the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI), weekly during the study to record motivation throughout. Additionally, a subset of participants completed a semistructured interview discussing their motivation. These measures were examined in hopes of finding an increase in motivation due to Fall-Based therapy.