Researchers Use Wii Games to Help Parkinson's Patients
From: Medical Design Technology - 09/26/2017
By: Tim Doty

A pair of Purdue University professors are using the popular Nintendo Wii
gaming system to help people with Parkinson's disease. Jessica Huber and Jeff
Haddad from the College of Health and Human Sciences are studying how playing
specially created games can improve a patient's movement, speech and overall
quality of life.

By having study participants stand on a balance board and move a cursor to a
specific target on a monitor, the researchers can study how brain activity
and body movement are connected, which often comes into play in seemingly
simple everyday tasks like walking and talking, which can be difficult for
people with Parkinson's.

Haddad says a pilot study done in collaboration with researchers at Purdue,
Indiana University and the University of Calgary, and using Parkinson's
patients along with otherwise healthy older adults, revealed that the games,
when utilized for a prescribed period of time, tended to show more positive
outcomes in gait and balance than traditional Parkinson's treatments.

Read the entire article and view a video (1:07) at:
https://www.mdtmag.com/news/2017/09/move-over-mario-researchers-use-wii-games-help-parkinsons-patients
http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2017/Q3/move-over,-mario-purdue-researchers-use-wii-games-to-help-parkinsons-patients.html

Links:
Jeff Haddad
https://www.purdue.edu/hhs/hk/Biomechanics-MotorBehavior/about/dr-jeff-haddad

COgnitive BALance Training (COBALT) in people with Parkinson's disease
https://www.purdue.edu/hhs/hk/Biomechanics-MotorBehavior/cognitive-balance-training-cobalt-in-people-with-parkinsons-disease

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