Development of exergaming technologies for children with cerebral palsy to improve hand and arm function - Cerebral Palsy (CP) is the leading cause of motor impairment in children and approximately 1 in 345 children in the United States have CP. Although CP is a lifelong disability, regardless of the level of impairment, therapeutic exercises are essential to either improve a skill or prevent degeneration. Unfortunately, the quality and volume of training do not often meet the demand for children with cerebral palsy (CwCP) due to the high cost of care, limited resources, and a lack of standardized care across different school districts. NeuroTechR3 in partnership with the New Jersey Institute of Technology will, in the course of this 6-month project, examine the possibility of transforming principles of neuroscience to evidence-based interventions into an easy to use, accessible, and affordable solution for CwCP. The goal of this project is to increase accessibility of goal directed therapeutic activities for CwCP and induce motivation to adhere to their exercise plan due to the engaging nature of our exergames. The objectives of this project are: 1) to conduct a focus group to determine the specific needs of CwCP, their caregivers, and their occupational therapists in order to determine the improvements made to the current system to adapt it for the target population, 2) to make system adjustments to make the device adaptable to the needs of CwCP. These changes include modifying three exergames and the system’s GUI, 3) to conduct a usability study to determine how the device meets the needs of children and school based OTs. Our focus is on assessing if the child can receive adequate amounts of therapeutically meaningful training through playing the games, the user friendliness of the system interface, the beneficial aspects of the progress analysis report, and the engagement of the games. The outcome of Phase I is a comprehensive understanding of needs and challenges of therapeutic interventions for CwCP. It will lay out a foundation of our future R&D and blueprint the Phase II plan for the further development of a therapeutic product for hand and arm for CwCP, with a library of modular goal-oriented and age appropriate exergames, data analysis progress reports, enabled by a cloud data pipeline using machine learning technology to personalize the therapeutic plan to dynamically adapt the training activity based on CwCP’s cognitive levels and physical growth.
