Design and evaluation of an interactive computer play platform to motivate participation in home-based therapies for young people with cerebral palsy: Let's Play!

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1 in 500 Canadians has cerebral palsy (CP), a lifelong condition and the most common cause of physical disability in children. Rehabilitation therapies are important for improving balance, coordination, flexibility, and strength of children with CP. Unfortunately conventional therapies are resource intensive, demand is greater than availability, and access can be challenging particularly in northern Canada. At best, therapy may be offered 60 min/week, while science suggests that 30 to 45 min per day is necessary to create changes in the brain that can lead to better function. As a result, there is a need for new home-based therapy programs. Families and children with CP do not take full advantage of current home programs due to lack of time, motivation, or forgetfulness. Researchers, therapists, parents and children are very interested in using lowcost, active video games that reward movements of the arms and legs (for example Wii, Kinect) to encourage daily practice of therapy movements at home in a fun way. The value of this interactive computer play, ICP, is supported for some skills (for example balance), but we still dont know if ICP can be used to improve function of the arms and hands. To help understand if ICP can be helpful in upper limb therapy, we will partner with Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. At Holland Bloorview, we will design a new ICP system for upper limb rehabilitation in partnership with therapists and children. Our goal is to create a system that will encourage long-term use (through story and multi-player games) and that is therapeutically effective (through better tracking of childrens movements). We will evaluate the system with 15 children with CP (aged 8-12 years) and their play partners to answer the question: Can ICP motivate at least 30 hours of regular, homebased therapy game play over 8 weeks? If successful, our ICP system will be fun for kids and provide the effective therapy children need in the long-term.