Interactive art rehab motivates patients

Featured on news4jax.com

Rehabilitation therapy can make all the difference for someone recovering from a serious injury. But it can be repetitive and boring. Now there’s a new way to motivate patients and their moves become works of art.  It's working for Brad Burns, who was seriously injured in a car accident back in May of 2008 where he wasn't wearing a seatbelt.  His life changed forever.

“Fractured all of my ribs on the right side and fractured my pelvis and had lacerated lungs and was on a ventilator,” Burns explained.

Now, partially paralyzed, it’s taken two years of rehabilitation therapy to help him re-learn how to walk and talk. But recently, he tried something new.

“It’s a lot of fun,” he said.

An interactive arts program at Ohio State uses bio-physical sensors to transform Brad’s movements into works of art.

“The whole idea is that the art, the product of the art, the visual art, would represent the struggle behind the art, and what’s more of a struggle than recovering from a neural injury,” explained Lise Worthen-Chaudhari, MA, MS, Research Assistant Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at The Ohio State University.

Each colorful mark he makes is actually data that can be analyzed. The idea is to distract patients and give them an opportunity to create while they work. 

“Something like this where you’re concentrating on something else, and it’s a little more engaging, and it’s more entertaining, you’re more likely to keep going,” Burns explained.

In the first study on interactive arts to ever be published in a medical journal, researchers found patients enjoyed the program and some, like Brad, performed better than they did during standard therapy.

“He was moving for longer, more difficult exercises, with more focus” Worthen-Chaudhari said.

“You realize pretty quickly that you’re working out when you start doing this,” added Burns.

The interactive art therapy can help people with neurological injuries, traumatic brain juries, strokes, and spinal cord injuries. Researchers are currently finishing a study to test the technology on patients with balance issues. They hope those results will be published sometime this year.