These interventions, performed with highly specialised animals in very specific neurological populations, deliver an increasing body of scientific evidence suggesting that they are an effective complement to other existing therapies. In these diseases, further high-quality studies are warranted in order to define the most appropriate programmes for therapy.
The Central Nervous System of humans continuously evolves when children engage in new activities. These activities are progressing from learning to eat as a baby over playing during childhood up to homework in all its dimensions. These activities, which are meaningful and relevant to everyone, constitute what occupational therapists call "occupations". The successful execution of these occupations makes the development of new roles as well as the construction of a correct state of health possible. Due to these reasons, occupational performance is a fundamental part of development throughout childhood. Homework is complex and extends beyond the school context to the home. For many children, the performance of these homework items is a difficult challenge or even impossible to overcome without the help of an adult. This article presents the design, implementation, and functional validation of an intelligent home environment that uses homework activities as a support tool for children with or without attention disabilities. In this project, the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is combined with the development of robotic assistance to implement an intelligent home environment. In this environment, we have included intelligent things (where the usual study chairs and desks become smart objects) that determine in real-time the child's behavior during the development of homework and a robotic assistant which interacts with the children providing the necessary accompaniment (supervision and guidelines) just as a therapist would do. This development has been functionally validated by tests on several school-aged children without pathologies. In a later phase of the study, the proposal will be validated with children with different pathologies with an impact on learning, including Attention Disorder Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The goal is the generation of intelligent places for therapeutic purposes within the home as assistance for children having difficulties to work with their homework assignment due to ADHD.
The importance of an early rehabilitation process in children with cerebral palsy (CP) is widely recognized. On the one hand, new and useful treatment tools such as rehabilitation systems based on interactive technologies have appeared for rehabilitation of gross motor movements. On the other hand, from the therapeutic point of view, performing rehabilitation exercises with the facial muscles can improve the swallowing process, the facial expression through the management of muscles in the face, and even the speech of children with cerebral palsy. However, it is difficult to find interactive games to improve the detection and evaluation of oral-facial musculature dysfunctions in children with CP. This paper describes a framework based on strategies developed for interactive serious games that is created both for typically developed children and children with disabilities. Four interactive games are the core of a Virtual Environment called SONRIE. This paper demonstrates the benefits of SONRIE to monitor children’s oral-facial difficulties. The next steps will focus on the validation of SONRIE to carry out the rehabilitation process of oral-facial musculature in children with cerebral palsy.
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