Can serious games be incorporated with conventional treatment of children with cerebral palsy? A review.
Games for CP rehab look fun but remain unproven until labs agree on shared measures.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team hunted for every paper that mixed video-game therapy with normal CP care. They scanned papers published up to 2014.
Kids of any age or CP type were included. The authors compared game groups to kids who got only standard physio or OT.
What they found
No clear winner. Some game studies showed better balance or reach, others showed no gain.
The hitch: every lab used its own game, dose, and test. With no shared yard-stick, the evidence stays mushy.
How this fits with other research
Bleyenheuft et al. (2013) saw that many kids with hemiplegic CP also have hidden sense deficits. If a game ignores touch or position feedback, gains may stall—one reason B et al. found mixed results.
Tezcan et al. (2013) showed CP kids score far lower on behavior and parent-stress parts of quality-of-life. Serious games that add social or story elements could hit these weak spots, but none of the reviewed trials measured HRQoL.
Kemmerer et al. (2023) flagged the same headache: without agreed social-validity checks, we can’t tell if new tools truly help families. B et al. echo the call—standardize the outcomes first.
Why it matters
Before you buy that shiny new VR bike, pause. Ask the vendor for data that uses the same motor tests you already run—like the BOT-2 or reach-scale. Push for HRQoL and parent-stress probes too. Until the field lines up its rulers, treat games as a fun adjunct, not a proven replacement.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The use of video games in rehabilitation is becoming more popular to clinicians. These games are embedded in off-the-shelf commercial entertainment applications or especially-developed for clinical purposes. Treatment of cerebral palsy (CP) children is a challenging task for clinicians. Lack of motivation and progress monitoring are two important factors clinicians need to deal with. The use of serious games (SG), sometimes referred to as Virtual Rehabilitation (VR), could therefore be an interesting adjuvant to conventional treatment for these patients. This is however a new discipline and many scientific issues remain to be solved. The aim of this paper is to describe available conventional treatment for CP children together with the level of evidence of each approach. A systematic review of the use of SG in rehabilitation is then conducted. 31 papers (7 randomized clinical trials, 16 cohort studies and 8 single-cases studies) were selected and analyzed, and their level of evidence compared to the conventional treatment. These studies reported outcomes for 352 patients. In summary, this review shows that it is difficult to compare those studies despite the large amount of patients. This is due to the lack of standardization in patient rehabilitation strategy and to the use of various clinical scales and scores. This non-standardization in patient follow-up between previously-published works make evidence-based conclusions difficult to obtain in order to support these techniques objectively. The use of SG for rehabilitation purposes currently meets similar issues. This paper proposes standardization strategies in order to improve treatment comparison and SG use in rehabilitation.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2014 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2014.04.016