title: Can serious games be incorporated with conventional treatment of children with cerebral palsy? A review.
abstract: The use of video games in rehabilitation is becoming more popular to clinicians. These games are embedded in off-the-shelf commercial entertainment applications or especially-developed for clinical purposes. Treatment of cerebral palsy (CP) children is a challenging task for clinicians. Lack of motivation and progress monitoring are two important factors clinicians need to deal with. The use of serious games (SG), sometimes referred to as Virtual Rehabilitation (VR), could therefore be an interesting adjuvant to conventional treatment for these patients. This is however a new discipline and many scientific issues remain to be solved. The aim of this paper is to describe available conventional treatment for CP children together with the level of evidence of each approach. A systematic review of the use of SG in rehabilitation is then conducted. 31 papers (7 randomized clinical trials, 16 cohort studies and 8 single-cases studies) were selected and analyzed, and their level of evidence compared to the conventional treatment. These studies reported outcomes for 352 patients. In summary, this review shows that it is difficult to compare those studies despite the large amount of patients. This is due to the lack of standardization in patient rehabilitation strategy and to the use of various clinical scales and scores. This non-standardization in patient follow-up between previously-published works make evidence-based conclusions difficult to obtain in order to support these techniques objectively. The use of SG for rehabilitation purposes currently meets similar issues. This paper proposes standardization strategies in order to improve treatment comparison and SG use in rehabilitation.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Anatomy, Biomechanics and Organogenesis (LABO), Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. Electronic address: bbonnech@ulb.ac.be.
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Bonnechère
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronics and Informatics - ETRO, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium; iMinds, Department of Future Media and Imaging (FMI), Gaston Crommenlaan 8 (Box 102), B-9050 Ghent, Belgium.
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Jansen
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronics and Informatics - ETRO, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Omelina
authors.affiliation: Rehabilitation Hospital Inkendaal, Centrum voor bewegingsanalyse, Vlezenbeek, Belgium; Centre d'analyse du Mouvement, Hôpital Brugmann, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Degelaen
authors.affiliation: Department of Paediatric Neurology - Hôpital Erasme, Belgium.
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Wermenbol
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Anatomy, Biomechanics and Organogenesis (LABO), Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rooze
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Anatomy, Biomechanics and Organogenesis (LABO), Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Van Sint Jan
mesh_terms: D002547:Cerebral Palsy / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D002648:Child; D005717:Games, Experimental; D006801:Humans; D009043:Motor Activity; D009069:Movement Disorders / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D016032:Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic; D018910:Video Games
keywords: Cerebral palsy; Neurorehabilitation; New technology; Rehabilitation; Treatment