Could a Video Game Be the Key to Stroke Recovery?
Sept. 29, 2014 - John
Krakauer, director of the BLAM Lab at Johns Hopkins University, and his team of researchers, artists, and programmers, is developing a new way of thinking about post-stroke therapies. By combining the human hand-eye coordination of video games and the playfulness of dolphins,
Krakauer is hoping to change the way we think about—and treat— stroke patients.
Read more about the game and its design here.
John Krakauer
Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience - Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
It's not always that easy to recognize at the time that something is really now. Maybe one way you can diagnose it at the time is people's immense resistance to it. If somebodies objecting vociferously, you're on to something.
My name is John Krakauer, I'm a professor of neurology and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University school of medicine.
Lots of argument, lots of discussion, open-mindedness and curiosity in unexpected places, I think that leads to bringing together domains that don't usually come together. In other words gaming, and art, and neuroscience.
I think our approach to stroke treatment therapy is innovative. And I hope that doesn't sound immodest, but I really don't think any one has got this kind of team trying this kind of treatment
Omar Ahmad
Chief Creative Engineer and Director - Kata Progrect
So the dolphin game came about as a solution to a need that dr. Krakauer had. Which is he wanted to be able to motorically connect a a patient to a creature that was different from a human. And what we had to do was create a simulation of an animal and in this case we chose a dolphin
It's this beautiful simulation of a creature that has its own bones its own muscles, it moves, it swims in its own environment and a user is jacked into it. That's really the essence of it and from that we can use it for a variety of things.
John Krakauer
So the most common disability after stroke is hemiparesis. It's when you lose motor control and strength on one side of your body. The other common symptoms are lose of speech and language, lose of sensation and loss of vision.
Most recovery in humans is happening early, in the first lets say month. We're trying to exploit plasticity so that they repair that loss of motor control and strength. Not learn to live with it, with what they have left, but to reverse it.
We had to create some kind of motivating, enriching environment to make people go back to childhood and explore in a non task based way what their limbs are capable of doing.
When you move most people think you move just to achieve something else. It's a means to an end. You move in order to pick up a glass, you move in order to get from A to B. But movement itself, the actual act of movement is enjoyable. We like putting our arm out the window of a car and feeling the wind blowing against it. We like even sitting on a train and thinking as it moves. We enjoy movement . We enjoy watching movement.
The game is the idea that one can develop an emotional connection to another organism, in this case animals, through the way it moves and then that reflects back to appreciating how oneself moves. And that there is a way that we live and exist through movement and that it needs to be captured through play and through science. And that''s what we've done.
