Type of active video-games training does not impact the effect on balance and agility in children with and without developmental coordination disorder: A randomized comparator-controlled trial

Developmental Coordination Disorders (DCD) and Interactive Games: A Literature Review

“…After a thorough study of the research works under consideration, the results showed that in the majority of them, the implementation of the intervention programs took place at school [23,28,31,34,36,37,40,41,44,45,47,50,[52][53][54][56][57][58] but also in a clinical setting 9 studies [29,32,35,41,45,46,52,53,62], while only 3 intervention programs [27,41,53] took place in the house. More specifically, in the school environment, in 2 of the 18 aforementioned research studies, one intervention took place in a designated classroom and another in an unused school room, while in one study [50] there is talk of the presence of two trainee therapists-students, during the intervention program, with predominantly positive results in all studies.…”

“…Further investigating the literature it was found that in a relatively large number of articles [24,[27][28][29][30][31][32]41,57,58], there was a significant improvement in balance for both children with and without DCD. In a study Smits Engelsman et al [57], a significant improvement was observed for children with DCD in the MABC-2 balance score, while the results of Werden et al [29], research on the MABC-2 balance subscales were similar.…”

“…Improvement in gross motor skills, such as running, ball, walking and jumping, was identified in a study by Page et al [27], in Australia, as well as in a study by Kuijpers et al [46], who reported improvement in walking and running. In contrast to these studies comes the research of Jelsma et al [58], who concluded that no significant changes were observed in running-sprint either for children with or without DCD, while [29] speak of failure in running flexibility and [48] of difficulty in lower limb control with a small percentage of children failing to control leg movements (table 1).…”

“…In all of the twenty-two articles under review (61.1%, Mean of use: 32.7 minutes) a positive correlation of intervention time with the effectiveness of interactive games was observed, with the exception of the two studies by Jelsma et al [47,48] (5.6%) in which the results from the use of interactive games do not appear encouraging, as no reference is made to the time of their use by the participants (Table 2). Positive but non-significant changes were identified in the results of six studies [52,[54][55][56]58], (16, 7%, Mean of use: 27.5 minutes), as the results between the intervention and control groups were positive but identical. The results are neutral in six studies [41,49,50,52,53,62] and in a percentage of 16.6 % (Mean of use: ~28.4 minutes), regarding the use of interactive games in relation to the duration of their use by the participants (Table 2).…”

“…The total duration of the interactive game intervention protocols in the reviewed studies ranged from three to sixteen weeks, with a mean of ~6.3 weeks, although five studies did not report the duration of the intervention protocols [30,38,[41][42][43]47], and in one study [47], only one intervention session of interactive games was performed resulting in children in the intervention group not showing the desired results in terms of improving their visual-motor coordination, something that did not happen in all the examined studies [23,24,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46]50,52,[54][55][56][57][58] in which a proportional relationship between intervention time and the use of interactive games was observed (table 2).…”