Video games score another win as a study claims they are a legitimate way to help post-stroke rehabilitation. The study gathers results on participants within 3 months after a vascular cerebral accident and proves that video games can, in fact, help with post-stroke rehabilitation if applied within the first month after the accident.
After decades of criticism, video games are slowly but steadily find their way into everyday life as a medium. We know for a fact that gaming helps in education, strengthening memory, decision making and constructive competition. What we didn’t know though is that video games can also serve as a rehabilitation method for upper limb post-stroke incidents.
A study posted at Science Direct claims that “video gaming is more efficient than conventional rehabilitation on both sensorimotor recovery and gross grasping function” if applied within the first month after a stroke. Here are the main highlights of the study:
- Are not superior to conventional rehabilitation of the upper limb in sub-acute stroke.
- Act as an additional therapy increasing the amount of rehabilitation after stroke.
- Video game rehabilitation could be more efficient when started before 30 days post-stroke.
51 patients took place in the study with a variation of days after a stroke incident. Those patients saw a significant change in their upper limb motor function and shoulder pain. The study suggests that “only a few rehabilitation methods have proven efficient in increasing sensorimotor recovery”. Video games, luckily for all us gamers, have proven promising in post-stroke rehabilitation especially if applied during the first month after the accident.
Exciting news? Yes! This will not only help older generations value the use of video games but actually appreciate them through their use in medicine. Even more, since gaming can also help in mental health, ADHD and stress treatments. It will be interesting if more experiments like this one occur in the future. Especially since we’ve only scratched the surface of what their benefits for medicine will be.
