Responses and reliability of candidate intensity measures to different mental and motor load levels of an upper limb exergame in children and adolescents with neurological diagnoses.
Gaizka Goikoetxea-Sotelo, Hubertus J A van Hedel
PMID 41189726WHAT IT FOUND
Children with neurological diagnoses reported higher effort and performed fewer movements as exergame difficulty increased.
Heart rate variability also dropped during harder motor tasks. However, these measures were not reliable when repeated on separate days, so they cannot yet track therapy intensity in practice.
Key findings
01The NASA-TLX effort and mental subscales, along with movement repetition capacity, significantly increased or changed across all three difficulty levels for both mental and motor tasks.
02Heart rate variability and activity count capacity responded significantly to increasing motor load but did not show significant differences across mental load levels.
03Test-retest reliability varied widely across measures, ranging from poor to good, with only heart rate variability in the mental condition consistently exceeding the acceptable threshold.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTsWhat 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 study was conducted at a single center, which may limit how well the results apply to other clinics. Data loss occurred for some participants due to sensor malfunctions or poor data quality, reducing the sample size for specific measures. The novelty of the exergames may have affected reliability, as children likely learned the tasks between the two sessions. Resting physiological measures were collected but were often higher than during the hardest tasks, suggesting initial nervousness influenced the baseline data. The NASA-TLX questionnaire, while valid for groups, showed variable reliability for individual responses in this pediatric neurological population.
Declared interests
The study was funded by the J&K Wonderland Foundation and the Anna Müller Grocholski Foundation. The funders were not involved in the study design, data collection, analysis, or writing.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that a change in heart rate or self-reported effort between sessions reflects a change in the child's capacity or therapy intensity. The test-retest reliability for most measures was poor to moderate, meaning the same child might show significantly different values on two separate days even if their condition and the task difficulty remained unchanged.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →