Balance disorders are a common impairment after an acquired brain injury (ABI). Neurorehabilitation programs focus on the rehabilitation of balance skills to enhance patients' self-dependency. The Wii Balance Board has been adopted with rehabilitative purposes due to its low cost and widespread battery of exercises. However, this entertainment system is oriented to healthy people and cannot easily adapt to the patient's motor (and possible cognitive) deficits. The objective of this study was two-fold: a) to study whether custom-made rehabilitative exercises on a force platform could improve the balance condition of ABI patients compared with conventional physical therapy programs; and b) to study if their clinical effects persisted in absence of the virtual training. To prove the first hypothesis, a randomized controlled trial (RCT) was carried out involving 17 ABI participants (control group: 8 participants; experimental group: 9 participants). To prove the second hypothesis a follow-up study (FUS) was carried out involving 7 ABI participants. The participants of both studies underwent 20 1-h sessions, from 3 to 5 sessions per week. The participants were assessed at the beginning and at the end of the treatment (RCT, FUS) and 1 month after the therapy (FUS). Significant improvements were detected in some scales for those participants who underwent the virtual therapy (RCT). The effects persisted over time (FUS). Balance training through low-cost force platforms and custom-made exercises can provide lasting clinical benefits to ABI chronic patients when compared to conventional treatments.
A Tangible User Interface (TUI) is a new interaction option that uses nontraditional input and output elements. A tangible interface thus allows the manipulation of physical objects using digital information. The exploration and manipulation of physical objects is a factor to be considered in learning in children, especially those with some kind of disability such as hearing, who maximize the use of other senses such as vision and touch. In a tangible interface, three elements are related - physical, digital and social. The potential of IoT for children is growing. This technology IoT integrated with TUI, can help for that parents or teachers can monitoring activities of the child. Also to identify behavior patterns in the child with hearing impairment. This article shows four case studies, where had been designed different products of Internet of Things Tangible applied a several contexts and with products of low cost.
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