Each Week OT expert, Sarit Tresser will be giving an in-depth insightful analysis into the various ways Health Games aid children with disabilities. Stay connected to receive first-hand input from a professional in the field of child development
The virtual environment of Timocco provides a performance monitoring tool that creates a therapeutic program for the child according to the needs, abilities and goals of the therapy.
The system is able to open a personal profile, to save desired game settings, and design a working program for each child. The personal profiling is simple and easy to operate. It allows the therapist to put the child’s personal details, as well as add additional comments, such as the diagnosis or the difficulties which have led him/her to receive treatment. Once the data is updated and has been saved, the access to it is instant with direct access from the game itself. When the therapist selects a child as an active child, all of the performances of that child are automatically saved for each of the Timocco games.
At the end of the activity, the therapist can access the database and watch the game results which reflect the performance of the child. Among the indicators which the system samples, one can find information about: the duration of the treatment, the number of correct moves, number of errors, response time of the child, score of performance efficiency, as well as display a track of the child’s movement of the hands and more.
The track of the hand movements will appear in the form of a graph and display the movement of each hand separately and together in relation to one another. This allows the movements to be recorded and displayed on the graph. In this way, you can see which of the child’s hands are dominant, which hands crossed the center line (if any), the quality of crossing the center line, and how often it takes place. One can also get information on the sequence of movement, location of hands in the scope of any given moment, and identify trends such as fatigue, side preference, mobility, and range of motion.
Amongst children with ADHD, we often see inefficient movement patterns and excessive movement. In this case, the graph of the hand movement will be very busy and the lines, which reflect the movement of the hands, will be scattered and fill the screen (see image below). In contrast, a child without ADHD will display a graph accurate and more organized.
Another example, is working with a child with cerebral palsy whose range of motion is full. In this example we want to see a graph which shows that his/her movement is growing from time to time and the graph is filled with uniformly distributed lines and symmetrical space.
Using these management tools, the therapist can adjust the treatment plan that would treat the personal abilities of each child based on previous performance and degree of progress.
All data can be exported into an Excel file if one wants to make statistical processes of data for research.
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