Video Game Rehab

The only experience 60-year-old Bob Pfahl had with the latest video games was watching his grandson play Wii. That changed in September 2009, when a stroke paralyzed his left side. “It was like being trapped inside my own body,” he says. The Rocky River, Ohio, resident was ready to try anything to get better — even video games.

Mr. Pfahl is part of a Cleveland State University study of video gaming, occupational therapy and physical therapy for stroke rehabilitation. Participating patients receive treatment at Cleveland Clinic and Lakewood Hospital, a Cleveland Clinic hospital.

“We’ve had gaming in our department for quite a while before the study,” says Michelle Wilson, an occupational therapist at Cleveland Clinic, “but we never tracked it to see how beneficial it actually was.” Now they’re using standardized stroke assessments to measure patients’ progress.

Depending on their interests and the movements they need to practice, patients choose from Wii or PlayStation 2 games. Mr. Pfahl, a left-handed baseball fan, uses a video baseball game to practice exercises that involve the same motor control required to swing a bat, control aim and hit a home run. A digital camera pointed at the player gives instant visual feedback.

It takes a lot of repetition to retrain muscle and motor movement after a stroke, but gaming makes the work fun. Mr. Pfahl has begun to regain use of his left arm and hand. Now he has his eye on a new prize: improving enough to challenge his grandson to a game of Wii baseball.