Assessing effectiveness of serious game training designed to assist in upper limb prosthesis rehabilitation.
Bart Maas, Corry K Van Der Sluis, Raoul M Bongers
PMID 38348457WHAT IT FOUND
Task-specific and non-task-specific serious games did not improve prosthesis simulator use more than mouse-and-keyboard control in able-bodied students.
Scores rose over testing, but training groups did not beat control, so transfer was not shown.
Key findings
01For the combined functional tests, no group differences were found, so the study did not show transfer from serious game training to prosthesis simulator use.
02Scores improved across the testing sessions, but the improvement was not specific to the task-specific or non-task-specific training groups.
03Individual differences were large across the functional and switch-control analyses.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The participants were able-bodied university students, not people using an upper limb prosthesis, so the findings may not apply to clinical prosthesis training. Testing used a prosthesis simulator attached to the forearm, not a participant's own prosthesis. The study included 36 participants, and 33 of 250 training sessions had missing co-contraction data because some participants could not produce correct co-contractions. Participants reported declining motivation and distraction during later training sessions, which could have affected performance. Some post-test aperture values exceeded 100% because of a calibration error. The authors found a group by test moment effect for Cylinder test slopes but could not identify a clear pattern to interpret.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the null result as proof that serious game training cannot help prosthesis users. The participants were able-bodied students using a simulator, and the control group did not differ from the training groups, so the study only fails to show transfer in this specific setup.