Dyslexia Telerehabilitation during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results of a Rhythm-Based Intervention for Reading

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak necessitated a reorganization of the rehabilitation practices for Learning Disorders (LDs). During the lockdown phase, telerehabilitation offered the possibility to continue training interventions while enabling social distancing. Given such an advantage of telerehabilitation methods for LDs, clinical research is still needed to test the effectiveness of diverse teletraining approaches by comparing their outcomes with those of face-to-face interventions. To compare the effectiveness of telerehabilitation vs. in-presence rehabilitation of dyslexia, a rhythm-based intervention for reading, called Rhythmic Reading Training (RRT), was tested in a small-scale clinical trial during the lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thirty children aged 8–13 with a diagnosis of developmental dyslexia were assigned to either a telerehabilitation or an in-presence rehabilitation setting and received RRT for 10 biweekly sessions of 45 min, supervised by a trained practitioner. The results showed that both telerehabilitation and in-presence rehabilitation were effective in improving reading and rapid automatized naming in children with dyslexia and that the effects were comparable between settings. Therefore, RRT was found to be effective in spite of the administration method (remote or in-presence). These results confirm the potential of telemedicine for the rehabilitation of LDs. Clinical Trial ID: NCT04995471.

Dyslexia: A Bibliometric and Visualization Analysis

“…The rank of “Chinese” had a dramatic increase from 49th in 2000–2016 to 32nd in 2017–2021. It is also worth mentioning that “executive function” ( 107 , 108 ), “morphological awareness” ( 109 , 110 ), “Meta-analysis,” “decoding” ( 16 ), “dyscalculia,” “EEG” ( 111 , 112 ), “Eye tracking” ( 113 , 114 ), “rhythm” ( 115 , 116 ), “bilingualism” ( 117 , 118 ), and “functional connectivity” ( 119 , 120 ) entered the top 50 high-frequency keywords in 2017–2021, suggesting that these topics may become the new research hotspots.…”

“…With the rapid development of the Internet, more knowledge is mainly obtained through network resources, and the effect of dyslexia on "information seeking" behavior has gradually attracted the attention of dyslexia researchers (132,133). In addition, the emergence of a new keyword COVID-19 in the past 2 years also showed that during the COVID-19 epidemic, researchers began to study the impact of the epidemic on dyslexia research (115,(134)(135)(136)(137). As the international exchange of dyslexia research continues to grow, scientists are aware that differences in education-related legislation in different countries may lead to persistent differences countries and had the biggest collaboration network in the dyslexia research.…”

The Role of Auditory and Visual Components in Reading Training: No Additional Effect of Synchronized Visual Cue in a Rhythm-Based Intervention for Dyslexia

“…Furthermore, medium-term significant effects on the outcome measures were found in a longitudinal study [26]. RRT efficacy was recently confirmed in a study testing the effect of a telerehabilitation version of the intervention [27].…”

Music-based and auditory-based interventions for reading difficulties: A literature review

“…In the same year, another Italian study ( Bonacina et al., 2015 ) tested the efficacy of a rhythm-based computerized program, called Rhythmic Reading Training (RRT), to improve reading in students with DD ( Cancer et al., 2016 , 2019 , 2021 , 2022 ; Cancer and Antonietti, 2017 ). The program included beat-based reading exercises, in which children would synchronize their reading to an isochronous beat.…”