Quantifying selective elbow movements during an exergame in children with neurological disorders: A pilot study

Background: it is difficult to distinguish between restorative and compensatory mechanisms underlying (pediatric) neurorehabilitation,as objective measures assessing selective voluntary motor control (svmc) are scarce. methods: we aimed to quantify svmc of elbow movements in children with brain lesions. children played an airplane game with the glove-based yougrabber system. participants were instructed to steer an airplane on a screen through a cloud-free path by correctly applying bilateral elbow flexion and extension movements. game performance measures were (i) % time on the correct path and (ii) similarity between the ideal flight path and the actually flown path. svmc was quantified by calculating a correlation coefficient between the derivative of the ideal path and elbow movements. a therapist scored whether the child had used compensatory movements. results: thirty-three children with brain lesions (11 girls; 12.6 ± 3.6 years) participated. clinical motor and cognitive scores correlated moderately with svmc (0.50-0.74). receiver operating characteristics analyses showed that svmc could differentiate well and better than clinical and game performance measures between compensatory and physiological movements. conclusions: we conclude that a simple measure assessed while playing a game appears promising in quantifying svmc. we propose how to improve the methodology,and how this approach can be easily extended to other joints. © 2016 the author(s).