Cognitive effects of weight-shifting controlled exergames in patients with chronic stroke: a pilot randomized comparison trial

Active exergames to improve cognitive functioning in neurological disabilities: a systematic review and meta-analysis

“…---Please insert Figure 1 about here ---We found thirteen articles published from 2011 to 2017 that fulfilled our inclusion criteria, including eight randomized controlled trials [38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45], two post-hoc analyses from a randomized controlled trial [46,47], and three non-randomized but controlled studies [48][49][50]. Among the included studies, two were conducted in Italy [46,49], two in the USA [42,43], two in Taiwan [45][46][47][48], and one each in Brazil [40], Germany [50], Korea [38], Israel [47], Sweden [39], Switzerland [41], and Turkey [44]. TABLE 2 shows the main characteristics of the included studies.…”

“…As expected, the mean age of the participants varied according to neurological disease. Four studies targeted post-stroke survivors [38,44,45,47], three targeted persons affected by multiple sclerosis [39,46,50], two targeted Parkinson's disease [40,41], one targeted youth population of children with Down Syndrome [48], another youth population with dyslexia [49], one targeted Alzheimer's disease [42], and one targeted persons with mild cognitive impairment [43]. The severity of all these neurological disabilities was generally mild-to-moderate.…”

“…Alternative interventions performed by control groups were quite heterogeneous and included: conventional occupational therapy and/or conventional rehabilitation therapy [38,48]; global and balance individual [40] or group [47] exercise; computer-assisted cognitive training delivered by the CogniPlus package [41]; supervised indoor walking [42]; health education programming [43]; Bobath neurodevelopmental treatment [44]; non-commercial device or conventional weight-shift training [45]; single-task balance exercises performed on an unstable platform or conventional balance training on a stable surface [50]. Franceschini and colleagues [49] used the same game (Wii Rayman Raving Rabbids) for both the exergaming and the control groups, selecting 10 active mini-games for children in the exergaming group and 10 non-active minigames for controls.…”

“…[49] to 24 weeks [43]. Length and frequency of interventions varied from 30 [38,39,42,45,46,50] to 90 [43] minutes per session, and once weekly [43] to 5-daily sessions per week [38,46]. One study provided twice per week individually-tailored time, preceded by a warm-up phase of therapist-led global motility exercises [40].…”

“…Cognitive functioning was the main outcome in six studies [41,43,[45][46][47]49], the secondary or exploratory outcomes in five studies [38,39,42,44,48], while the remaining two studies analyzed dual-task performance in gait and balance [40,50]. One study reported both dual-task measures and a global cognitive test [40] (see TABLE 3).…”