Gamified Virtual Environment and Interaction Design for Activities of Daily Living Training

Ludic games and gamification processes can extend functional skills in players as they integrate different intelligences and stimulate the cognitive, perceptual, and motor activities. Play can facilitate the work of occupational therapist since provides better cooperation of the patient, besides helping in its development, increasing its behavioral repertoire, mainly in the accomplishment of activities of daily living. This chapter addresses these issues, discussing the design of a gamified virtual environment that helps occupational therapists to develop the potential of children and adolescents with mild, moderate, and severe neuropsychomotor disorder. For that, the authors present an investigation of the use of a gamified virtual environment and interaction devices in the training of activities of daily living. As result, they note that games as assistive technology can encourage the integration of education, rehabilitation, and habilitation of people in situations of vulnerability and social risk, providing access and inclusion through playful and challenging activities.

Cognitive Performance in Immersive Environments After Acquired Brain Injury

The use of immersive environments such as virtual and augmented reality is quickly developing. For cognitive assessment and training in a neuropsychological setting, this offers a perspective for innovation and improvement of existing methods. Most of the current clinical uses of immersive environments focus on factors such as anxiety, or motor activities for physical therapy. Cognitive applications, concerning, for example, memory, attention, visuospatial processing, are relatively scarce. In this chapter, considerations of using immersive environments for cognitive purposes are presented. In addition to immersion, the individual experience of immersive environments, as expressed by sense of presence, will be discussed. By examining advantages and disadvantages of using immersive environments to measure and train cognitive performance, recommendations for clinical use of these methods are provided.

La formación del profesor de Educación Física en las Necesidades Educativas Especiales, hacia la reflexión y la acción, desde acuerdos internacionales y Leyes en Chile (The training of the Physical Education teacher in Special Educational Needs, towards

El Informe Warnock y la Declaración de Salamanca, establecieron criterios estandarizados sobre conceptos y requerimientos mínimos para una enseñanza homogénea de los centros educativos para las personas con Necesidades Educativas Especiales (NEE). Las NEE dentro de la normativa en Chile, se clasifican en Necesidades Educativas Especiales Permanentes y Transitorias. Las cuales, mediante Decretos, Leyes y acuerdos internacionales, los niños, niñas y adolescentes tienen el derecho de una educación de calidad, tendiendo en consideración las características particulares que pueden presentar los estudiantes, este acompañamiento puede ser transitorio y/o permanente. De esta manera, se busca que, a través de la Educación Especial, el alumnado obtenga herramientas necesarias para su utilización en contextos sociales y laborales. Sin embargo, desde la Educación Física en contextos escolares, se evidencia poca preparación o conocimiento de las características de las NEE que presente un estudiante por parte del profesor de Educación Física, si bien, en distintas universidades se encuentra la asignatura que dote a los estudiantes de pedagogía de herramientas y competencias para el trabajo con escolares con NEE, se evidencia que existe una falta de componentes teóricos y prácticos para trabajar con NEE. Finalmente, se invita a la reflexión para la utilización de actividades físico – deportivas o motrices adaptadas, las cuales podrían permitir ser una herramienta complementaria e inclusiva en la clase de Educación Física escolar. Abstract. The Warnock Report and the Salamanca Declaration established standardized criteria on concepts and minimum requirements for a homogeneous teaching of educational centers for people with Special Educational Needs (SEN). SEN within the regulations in Chile are classified as Permanent and Transitory Special Educational Needs. Which, through Decrees, Laws and international agreements, children and adolescents have the right to a quality education, taking into consideration the characteristics that students may present, this accompaniment may be transitory and / or permanent. In this way, it is sought that, through Special Education, students obtain the necessary tools for their use in social and work contexts. However, from Physical Education in school contexts, little preparation, or knowledge of the characteristics of SEN presented by a student is evidenced by the Physical Education teacher, although, in different universities there is the subject that provides students pedagogy of tools and competencies for working with schoolchildren with SEN, it is evident that there is a lack of theoretical and practical components to work with SEN. Finally, reflection is invited for the use of adapted physical - sports or motor activities, which could allow them to be a complementary and inclusive tool in the school Physical Education class.

Sensorimotor Self-organization via Circular-Reactions

Newborns demonstrate innate abilities in coordinating their sensory and motor systems through reflexes. One notable characteristic is circular reactions consisting of self-generated motor actions that lead to correlated sensory and motor activities. This paper describes a model for goal-directed reaching based on circular reactions and exocentric reference-frames. The model is built using physiologically plausible visual processing modules and arm-control neural networks. The model incorporates map representations with ego- and exo-centric reference frames for sensory inputs, vector representations for motor systems, as well as local associative learning that result from arm explorations. The integration of these modules is simulated and tested in a three-dimensional spatial environment using Unity3D. The results show that, through self-generated activities, the model self-organizes to generate accurate arm movements that are tolerant with respect to various sources of noise.

Reaching in sitting: The effect of seat design and body manipulations

BACKGROUND: Sitting is a common and familiar position used daily as a platform for many motor activities in the workplace, at school, or at home. OBJECTIVE: To investigate how difference in the chair design and selected sitting manipulations contribute to reach distance in sitting. METHODS: Ten healthy subjects were required to reach forward as far as possible while sitting in an adjustable chair with 0°, 10° forward or 10° backward inclination of the seat, with and without footrest and leg support, with legs crossed, and when holding the edge of the seat with the contralateral arm. RESULTS: In comparison to sitting with feet on the footrest, the maximal reaching distance decreased significantly when sitting on either forward or backward inclined seat (p < 0.05) and it increased when the subjects held the edge of the seat while seated with footrest and the posterior leg support (p < 0.05). There was no major effect of crossing the legs or the use of anterior leg support on the maximal reach distance. CONCLUSIONS: Modification of the chair design could increase or decrease reaching distance in sitting. The outcome of the study provides a background for future investigations of the effect of sitting positions on reaching distance in the workplace, at home, or at school.

Potentiating Gross Motor Coordination in 5-year-old Infants

The practice of gross motor coordination allows the infant to perform experiential actions to reach maturity, evidencing the passage from practical action to the action of thinking. In this way, feelings and sensations are promoted; discovering one's own body, space and time. The objective of the research was to describe the level of gross motor coordination presented by five-year-old children from I.E.I. N° 0345, Lima and I.E.I. N° 166 "Warma Kuyay", Callao, 2020. The research approach was quantitative, basic type and comparative descriptive design. The technique used was observation and the instrument was the checklist validated through the expert judgment technique and the reliability was 0.911, according to Cronbach's alpha. The results obtained describe the differences presented by five-year-old students in relation to gross motor coordination; the main indicators being the prioritization of the body through movement and the orientation to the development of motor activities, especially in the first years of life. This, because it favors the physical, emotional, socio-affective and cognitive levels, which evidences the differences between the samples investigated.

A brief review on motor development: fundamental motor skills as a basis for motor skill learning

In this study, we review the relationship between motor development and motor learning, and present a new metaphor that represents the sequence of motor development, which highlights fundamental motor skills as an important phase in the process. As one of the most relevant phases of motor development, several studies that analyzed fundamental motor skills were reviewed in typical developing children as well as in children with disabilities. Most studies revealed motor performance levels below expected since proficiency was not observed. We discuss these results considering fundamental motor skills as essential for the motor development process. Such results raise the awareness of the need to offer children conditions to explore and experience motor activities in order to enhance motor competence.

Sub-cellular elemental imaging of human muscle tissues affected by neuromuscular diseases

Various types of neuromuscular diseases differ in symptoms, pathology, and clinical picture but one of their common elements is muscle weakness, which could lead to human motor activities impairment and in many cases to shortening of life span and even death due to respiratory failure. That is why it is very important to better understand the underlying causes of these diseases to be able to implement new methods of treatment more effectively. This paper presents the results of the elemental analysis of human muscular tissues affected by dystrophy and myopathy. For this purpose, the particle-induced X-ray emission method was used, which is perfectly suited for measuring light elements. The samples were analysed for differences in the elemental composition of Na, Mg, P, S, Cl, K, Fe, Zn, and Br. The results were presented in the form of elemental concentration maps and a thorough statistical analysis of the obtained data using the advanced statistical methods.

Brain to Mind: Creation of the Virtual World

The human brain has developed the capability for routine sensory-motor monitoring and controls, present in all living beings, and additional skills for symbolic and verbal expressions of all sensory-motor activities and emotional experiences. Each brain could monitor and become aware of its own thoughts and emotions, all of which constitute the “mind”. Each person mentally creates verbal and symbolic expressions related to all sensory-motor activities and emotional experiences, and what one proposes to carry out. Each human being mentally creates an immensely enriched virtual mental world, and they succeed in physically realizing most of them. Different parts of the human brain contribute to different types of processing of incoming signals and retrieved signals already stored in the brain and the newly created and modified ideas are stored and used by the individual. The ideas and signals stored create emotional arousal, which the individual may experience and may make use of while dealing with the world and the individuals and other items of the which the individual may encounter in life. The ideas created within the brain may be played repeatedly and when the individual listens to his/her own ideas, the person becomes aware of the ideas. Normally awareness develops during the creation of new ideas, and during their retrieval. Oneself becoming aware or conscious of own ideas and the ideas expressed by others could develop an extensive knowledge base and may help in all planning and action executions, with others and materials of the world that one may encounter face to face or during their retrieval periods. The knowledge base has helped man to enhance the same, as well as, create new entities, which has been a routine human contribution during each person’s life. The emotions aroused during such interactions with the persons who may present ideas or own retrieved ideas are experienced by the self, who may express the emotionally loaded words or actions to others. The mind decides the world one lives in and mentally shares the realities one faces during one’s life period. Living is the process when one could share the same realities and the world, and could have experiences of the same and express own emotional reactions towards those realities.