Application of Commercial Games for Home-Based Rehabilitation for People with Hemiparesis: Challenges and Lessons Learned.

Objective: To identify the factors that influence the use of an at-home virtual rehabilitation gaming system from the perspective of therapists, engineers, and adults and adolescents with hemiparesis secondary to stroke, brain injury, and cerebral palsy.

Materials And Methods: This study reports on qualitative findings from a study, involving seven adults (two female; mean age: 65 ± 8 years) and three adolescents (one female; mean age: 15 ± 2 years) with hemiparesis, evaluating the feasibility and clinical effectiveness of a home-based custom-designed virtual rehabilitation system over 2 months. Thematic analysis was used to analyze qualitative data from therapists' weekly telephone interview notes, research team documentation regarding issues raised during technical support interactions, and the transcript of a poststudy debriefing session involving research team members and collaborators.

Reducing Trunk Compensation in Stroke Survivors: A Randomized Crossover Trial Comparing Visual and Force Feedback Modalities.

Objective: To investigate whether the compensatory trunk movements of stroke survivors observed during reaching tasks can be decreased by force and visual feedback, and to examine whether one of these feedback modalities is more efficacious than the other in reducing this compensatory tendency.

Design: Randomized crossover trial.

Setting: University research laboratory.

Direct measurement of spontaneous strategy selection in a virtual Morris water maze shows females choose an allocentric strategy at least as often as males do.

Considerable evidence indicates that males navigate large-scale space better than females, and some have previously attributed this difference to a greater ability of males to select or use an allocentric (cognitive mapping) navigational strategy. We directly tested this proposal by having males and females navigate in an "ambiguous" virtual Morris water maze environment that permitted participants to choose and use either an allocentric or an egocentric strategy. A novel probe trial at the end of training revealed which strategy each participant had been using and showed that the strategy selected by the greatest number of males and females was allocentric, and that this bias was even greater for females.