Gone are the days when moms could take their kids to task for whiling away their time playing video games or staring at the TV screen while their PlayStation or Wii game was on. Today, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are some aspects of gaming that are beneficial to health, especially to general mental well-being and recovery of motion after an illness or a stroke. This has been proved conclusively by researchers at the University of Southampton who are using computer games as rehabilitation tools for patients who are recovering from a stroke.

A stroke leaves you with numbness and lack of movement on one side of your body – your face, arm and/or leg become weak and you lose control over them. The recovery process is slow and tedious, and if the blood flow to the affected area of your brain is restored before permanent damage is done, your rehabilitation program determines how fast you return to normalcy. To this end, ARM (Assessment, Rehabilitation, Movement), an initiative set up by a group of therapists, doctors, engineers and psychologists at the University of Southampton proves to be a fun rehab tool for those who are recovering from a stroke.

It is meant to help them regain movement of their arm and control it better through a technique known as Iterative Learning Control, something that was earlier used only in the manufacture and research of industrial robots. In theory, the process is the same – you use iterative learning to teach the limb how to move. In the robots, it is achieved using artificial intelligence; for humans recovering from a stroke, it is a process of teaching the brain movements that are innate, but which it has forgotten because of the illness.

In layman’s terms, gaming technology is being used to retrain arm and hand functions that have been diminished or paralyzed because of the brain damage caused by a stroke. The initiative has borne fruit thanks to the efforts of the teams at the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science and the School of Health Sciences, both of which combined to come up with this ingenious method for stroke rehabilitation.ARM is even more significant because it has provided researchers with a way to understand how the brain recovers after a stroke and because it allows patients to see how they are progressing, monitor their progress, and try to improve their progress as the days go by. A grant of £2M from the National Institute for Health Research will allow this technology to be taken out of the lab and integrated into the mainstream healthcare practice so that the hundreds of thousands of people who suffer from a stroke every year can recover in a fun and positive way.

About the Author

Shannon Wills is a freelance writer whose current focus is on the topic of Physical Therapist Assistant Schools, a site dedicated to helping students find physical therapy assistant programs and compare physical therapy assistant school options.  Shannon covers a variety of health beats including diabetes management, anti-aging and healthy eating.  She welcomes your comments at her email id : shannonwills23@gmail.com.