MindMotion GO and Mind Motion PRO is a collection of technologies that allows our patients to interact with a simulated environment in real time. This stimulates their senses and triggers motor skills practice and therapy. The motion of the limbs is displayed in the virtual world as a replication of the motion produced in the real world by the patient. Virtual environments can be used to present complex sensory information to the user and have far reaching applications in cognitive therapy. The virtual environment interfaced with robotic systems can monitor the specificity and frequency of visual and auditory feedback, and can provide adaptive learning algorithms and graded assistive or resistive forces that can be objectively and systematically manipulated, to create individualized motor learning paradigms. Thus, it provides a rehabilitation tool that can be used to exploit the nervous systems’ capacity for sensorimotor adaptation and provide plasticity-mediated therapies.
Patients effectively play games which they control with repetitive, motor exercises that closely match real life motor skills. This assists retraining their visual processing and visual memory, which is responsible for the brain’s ability to spatially organise, plan motor skills and negotiate space, which are key to living an independent daily life.
Additional information about MindMotion GO and PRO is available from the Mindmaze website.
MindMotion GO: Empowerment for Patients
After a loss of abilities caused by brain injury such as stroke, it’s common for patients to experience disappointment in oneself or a feeling of not being good enough, which creates a barrier to the learning that they need for their recovery. Using this digital therapy at the Birkdale Paediatric & Adult Neuro Centre has provided a new dimension to neuro rehabilitation for our therapists. It has enabled us to make the repetitive, motor exercises more fun, and more stimulating for the patients to perform again and again. Which is what we need to achieve motor recovery. MindMotion GO and MindMotion PRO empowers patients to challenge themselves during their programme of neuro rehabilitation and engage in personal achievement, which is a huge asset in encouraging the sense of empowerment in their path of recovery. What’s more MindMotion GO can be installed at home to help patients keep up with regular exercises without travelling.
Who Would Benefit from MindMotion GO
Motor recovery is vital for the neuro rehabilitation of patients with brain injury. Ocular motor skills are key to living an independent daily life. Visual processing is responsible for the brain’s ability to spatially organise, plan motor skills and negotiate space. The Role of Eye Movements in Stroke Patients affects all of daily life, such as the ability to navigate through narrow spaces and causing difficulty walking indoors. Loss of hand function is widely reported by stroke patients as the most disabling motor deficit.
Using Mind Motion GO and Mind Motion PRO at the Birkdale Paediatric & Adult Neuro Centre has shown our therapists improvements in our stroke patients’ visual spatial orientation and visual memory. Using this technology stimulates mirror cells and we see great improvements in ocular motor skills. It supports body awareness in a space and recognition of the body in space which all contributes to neuro rehabilitation and motor recovery.
How it Works
Visually following a target using virtual reality (VR) trains saccadic eye movements helping patients to learn to look away from the ground, which is their reflex in order to avoid missing steps. This is also important for developing proprioception – the body’s ability to perceive its own position in space.
Using Mind Motion GO and Mind Motion PRO provides a series of exercises for trunk upper limbs and lower limbs. We have seen that the memory of movements learned, transfers very well to real life skills needed for neuro rehabilitation:
- Improvement in motor planning
- Learning to associate the movements learned with a language which was enabling them to reproduce the same action.eg transferring weight from one leg to the other. After practising with the VR, our patient is enabled to repeat this when we use the ward shift. Our patient knew what to do and how to recreate the action.
- Repetition
- Mind Motion GO can be installed to use at home
- Motor learning and perception of movements is improved
Birkdale Paediatric & Adult Neuro Centre Harness the Power of Virtual Reality for Patients Successful Recovery
Neurorehabilitation and restoration rely on experience-dependent, neuro-plasticity, which can only be harnessed by high-intensity, high-dose behavioral experiences that go beyond traditional rehabilitation. Movement based digital solutions see patients physically interacting with engaging, gamified content, which is designed to holistically train skills whilst it can also objectively assess motor and cognitive function.
Loss of visual field affects all daily life, such as the ability to pass safely through narrow spaces and navigating objects, like in a typical home environment. Difficulties with perception are also a big issue. One example is judging if their cup is full as they have no depth perception. They have difficulty drawing a complete picture or even realising some part of the picture is missing.
Evidence shows us that learning new motor skills is essential for inducing functional neuroplasticity and functional recovery. A powerful tool in motor recovery is adaptive, interactive neuro training, which can consistently develop a motor outcome that is closer to the targeted real life skill. Technology-facilitated, repetitive movement training has proved an effective stimulus for normalizing upper extremity motor control in patients with moderate to severe impairments, who otherwise have difficulty performing unassisted movement.
Contact us to find out more about MindMotion GO and PRO and neuro rehabilitation.