TORONTO - Canadian researchers have high hopes for a new type of video game that could potentially change the way stroke sufferers receive treatment, while empowering therapists to either work with their patients longer or see more people every day.
Researchers at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute and game designers at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., some 690 kilometres apart, are working on a project that falls within a growing genre called "serious games," video games that aren't designed with entertainment primarily in mind, said Dwayne Hammond, a strategic advisor at Algoma.
"All games teach, they're all puzzles of some sort, and so if you develop a game specifically for rehabilitation purposes ... it has potential to cause patients to follow their therapy much more than otherwise," he said.
"People are starting to recognize that games have value beyond just entertainment."
Therapists are already using off-the-shelf video games to help patients recover after a stroke.
A recent Canadian study found therapy involving Nintendo Wii motion-controlled games were more beneficial to stroke patients than the block-stacking Jenga game and playing cards.
"The Wii is great but certainly I think the expectation is when you start to develop any product for an actual purpose, targeting something, you will be much more effective at that," Hammond said.
"We are just beginning to look at all this incredible technology that game developers have created and we've just started to think about what else can we do with this stuff."
The partnership between the school and rehab institute was established about two years ago. It eventually grew into a full-time endeavour once funding was acquired.
"They were already excited about what the Wii could do but they just didn't have a team to start exploring this. We started to sit down and look at some of their projects and some of their work and research they had in place," Hammond said.
"One of them just leapt off the page as being a great starting point and it was because it was already somewhat game-like."
That idea, which turned into the product the team is working on today, involved a therapist using paper cards to help patients exercise their brains.
"An individual who had suffered a stroke would sit down with a therapist and look at a card - say with a picture of a piano - and they would go through a series of prompts to help them think about the word piano in different ways," he explained.
"They would just try to get you to think about that word in different ways in order to help your brain reconnect the word piano, if that linkage had been broken."
The exercise had already proven effective but the team realized it could get better by going digital.
"We just saw this as something we could take to another level by putting it in a digital medium. There's a lot of advantages we could bring in terms of tracking the progress of the clients who are responding to this therapy," Hammond said.
The research team also realized the software could be developed so interaction between patient and therapist could be done remotely, which has several advantages.
"People can stay home, which means therapists - who currently spend a significant amount of their work day on the road travelling between patients - could potentially stay in their office and they would be able to spend much more of their time serving their clients, or other clients," he said.
"And with research you need a very targeted audience - it may be females 29 to 32 who've had this type of stroke or whatever - so expanding the ability to deliver the therapy to specific patients for research purposes is of great interest."
The advances in therapeutic video games are also important because they help keep the patient committed, and perhaps even compelled, to complete their treatment, said Elizabeth Rochon, a Toronto Rehab scientist and speech-language pathology associate professor at the University of Toronto.
"If you think about video games and you took them apart, many of them would be exceedingly boring. You do the same thing over and over and over again but somehow people get addicted to them," she said.
"The idea that we could take some of the therapies that we do that often have a repetitive component to them but make it fun and alluring and keep people engaged was very attractive."
The team hopes that in about a year their software will be in a commercialized state with a bolstered number of applications for patients and therapists.
And perhaps one day those games may even have a preventative element, she added.
"With all of the research that's coming out these days about the benefits of remaining mentally active as well as physically active to help ward off things like dementia, I think that's definitely coming," she said.
"And although it's probably early days, we're probably not that far down the line."