The stimulation was proportional to the degree of the unimpaired hand opening as detected by an instrumented glove worn on that hand. Volitional opening of the non-paretic hand produces stimulated opening of the paretic hand. The games the children played included paddle ball, skee ball, sound tracker (following a moving track generated by different songs) and marble maze (guiding marbles out of a
maze and into a bucket).
“It was really fun to sit in a treatment session with the kids,” says Curby. “Six weeks is a fairly short treatment period, but we saw improvements in both kids.” One of the patients had a moderate level disability. Prior to the CCFES-mediated video game intervention, he didn’t use his paretic hand. By the end of the summer, he was using that hand to pick up things. “Because he was able to play video games that were exciting to him, he figured out really quickly how to use his unaffected hand to help move his affected hand,” says Curby. “It was amazing to watch him gain awareness of that whole limb!”
The other patient is more severely affected by his disability. Though he still doesn’t independently open his hand without stimulation, he has begun using his arm, shoulder and elbow in ways he never has before, says Curby. He recently picked up a ball using two arms during an occupational therapy session, something he never did before the intervention. “I can only imagine the benefits if we’re able to use this
treatment over a longer period of time with kids with a moderate disability” says Curby. “For any kid, there’s big potential.”
Fu agrees that the results are encouraging. He is currently applying for grants to conduct a larger, controlled study to ascertain why they are getting results and how they can design and optimize the treatment for a more general population of cerebral palsy patients. “We have some ideas on why the stimulation is helping, but we really need to do more experiments,” says Fu. “If we can figure it out, maybe we can provide targeted therapies for kids with impaired hand function.”