Sensor game rehabilitation for children with severe motor and intellectual disabilities-medical care dependent group: feasibility case series study.

Only four children, all at one after-school service, and every session was run by the same researcher. There was no control group, nobody was randomly assigned, and nobody was blinded. No statistical testing was done, so the changes in motor function, quality of life and parental burnout are single before-and-after observations in individual children. They could be chance, ordinary development, or the extra attention the children received. The programme lasted four weeks with one 15-minute session a week, which may be too little to change anything, and the authors themselves say the frequency was kept low to avoid tiring the children. The CHOP INTEND has not been validated for this group of children, and the authors say changes on it should be interpreted with caution. There was only one week of follow-up after the last session, so nothing is known about whether any change lasts. The parents volunteered knowing what the study was about, and one parent's answers moved in the wrong direction. Feedback was collected by the same researcher who delivered the intervention, which the authors accept may have biased it. The children differed widely in diagnosis and ability, and one child withdrew before the first assessment because of an acute exacerbation.

The authors declare that financial support was received for the work and/or its publication, and the support they name is the Yuumi Memorial Foundation for Home Health Care. The intervention used a commercial application and sensor made by Digireha Inc. and Moff Inc. of Tokyo; the paper does not state whether either company had any role in the study.

Do not read the improved motor scores as evidence that the sensor game works. There was no control group, nobody was blinded and no statistical tests were run, one child's motor score did not change at all, and one parent's quality-of-life rating fell rather than rose. The parents who took part volunteered for a study they knew about, so they may have avoided saying anything negative.