Within the senior care field, exercise has long been touted as one of the best ways to stay healthy. It helps alleviate many illnesses, and it works well toward prevention, too. The exercise doesn’t need to be strenuous, it just needs to be there and it needs to be there a few times per week. However, a lot of people find that exercise is too hard after doing it for a while. This doesn’t need to be the case, and it’s discouraging because exercise is so beneficial. Luckily, recent studies have once again reaffirmed the fact that interactive video games, such as those found within Nintendo Wii, are helpful.
This most recent study looked at stroke survivors and it found that those that played games on the Wii were able to benefit through a customized physiotherapy routine. One of the symptoms of a stroke is a loss of ease when it comes to movement, and using the controller to teach your arms to move again is an easier and much more fun way to get physical therapy in. It helps patients to relearn coordination skills and it can also be used to help relearn problem solving skills again. A lot of these things can be tough to accomplish through other methods, but because video games have clear goals, and the movement of the controller is a part of achieving these things, visualizing how to move it becomes much easier for many people.
It’s not just remote use that improved within this study, either. It was found that patients were able to better pick up pegs and place them correctly than they were prior to treatments. The increase in this was threefold, meaning that Wii users were three times better equipped after using the Wii than they were beforehand. It’s an extremely encouraging bit of news because strokes can be so difficult to recover from. A large percentage of people lose full usage of arms (70 percent), and of that number, only about 20 percent regain the ability that they once had. The results of this study show that there might be better ways to recover than what was once thought.
Video games have been stereotyped as being just for kids, but the results of this clearly indicate that there are actual medical benefits when they are used for a specific purpose. This isn’t the kind of mindless game that you might have in mind, but a game tailor suited for helping regain movement in affected limbs. When video games are used like this, the results can be pretty astounding. The thought that stroke damage done years ago is irreversible is now fading, too. One participant was able to do things afterward that she hadn’t been able to for 11 years since losing the use of her arms.
Participants had fun, too. They played games like air hockey, batted balls around, and mimicked a three dimensional avatar. All of these things help with coordination and teaching your brain new pathways to send movement signals to your arms. Strokes are common amongst the elderly, and video games can help. Even if they are something done within the home under the guidance of a caregiver, they are going to be more likely to show improvement.
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