Development of an effective therapy and objective assessment for children with birth injuries

Abstract

Sitting in a Huple, a patented hemisphere-like tool, permanently stimulates the vestibular system, thus improving the balancing ability of children with movement disorders. The Gézengúz Foundation for Children with Birth Injuries has been successfully applying this tool in therapy. By attaching x-Inertial Measurement Unit, a wireless three-dimensional orientation sensor, to the Huple, it can serve as an input peripheral for simple PC games. Children are thus motivated; they willingly perform balance training as well as participate in the game-like test. This improves the accuracy and reproducibility of the assessment. Knowing the actual state of the participants is an important element of feedback for the therapy. This paper describes in detail the development of the therapeutic and assessment method on the basis of the Huple: the definition of the movement pattern, the parameters characterizing the movement, and the algorithms used to rank children. Measurement series of 10 children with movement disorders validate the effectiveness of the game-like assessment.

Accelerometric Assessment of Postural Balance in Children: A Systematic Review

“…Other cross-sectional studies used ACCs for the analysis of static balance with the aim of estimating the normative assessment data through the Balance Error Scoring System (BESS) method [41], evaluating PC of children in a seated position [44], determining the relationship between PC during gait and PC in a seated position [36], and assessing the effect of regular physical activity practice on the development of PC [47]. Finally, the rest of the cross-sectional studies determined the role of the limbs in the PC of the trunk [43], compared static balance between children with typical development (TD) and children with development coordination disorder (DCD) [45], and evaluated the applicability of the Huple device as an instrument for the rehabilitation of children with different pathologies [48]. A blinded, observational, case-control study was focused on evaluating static and dynamic balance in children with bilateral cochleo-vestibular loss with cochlear implants [35].…”

“…Among the latter, the state of postural control in children with cerebral palsy (CP) was the study object in eight studies: exclusively in four of them [32,36,43,44], using data of children with TD as the control group in three [37,40,42], and, lastly, analyzing children with TD, healthy young and older adults, and older people with subacute stroke in one study [34]. Balance was also studied in children with DCD [33,38,45], bilateral cochleo-vestibular loss [35], and different neurodevelopmental disorders [48].…”

“…The samples used were small, with less than 70 participants in most of the cases [32,33,[35][36][37]39,40,[42][43][44]46,48]. Only six studies analyzed larger samples [31,34,38,41,45,47], with sample sizes ranging from 85 participants (of whom only 25 were children) [34] to 6762 participants (of whom only 606 were children) [41].…”

“…In contrast, the study of Shiratori et al [42] used a female proportion of 70%. Finally, seven studies used relatively balanced samples in terms of sex distribution [34,37,39,40,[46][47][48], with female proportions between 50% [46,47] and 45% [37].…”

BME VIK Annual Research Report on Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 2016

“…Children are thus motivated to perform balance training and participate in the game-like test. This improves the accuracy and reproducibility of the assessment [133,134].…”