What Is It?
An injury to the brain, either penetrating or non-penetrating that results in fatigue, speech problems, difficulty sleeping, loss of balance, seizures, and nausea.
Traumatic brain injury can occur due to a motor vehicle accident, fall, assault, or sports related injury. A force impacts the skull which causes the brain to “bounce” between the skull resulting in diffuse brain tissue damage.
Long-term complications of TBI’s include headaches, seizures, loss of balance, difficulty sleeping, and temporary or prolonged loss of consciousness.
Cognitive complications resulting from TBI include language, attention, memory, and executive function deficits. Patients may also experience emotional complications, such as sadness, irritability, and anger.
What Can Be Done?
Treatment for TBI includes medication, behavior management, physical and occupational therapy, speech therapy, and cognitive rehabilitation. Oftentimes, TBI patients are under the care of a team of therapists as many brain functions are disrupted causing interference with everyday life activities.
Cognitive rehabilitation is essential for return to work and establishing normal routines within TBI populations. Patients can benefit from one-on-one sessions with therapists as well as group therapy within a TBI support group in or out of the hospital.
How Can HappyNeuron Pro Help?
HappyNeuron Pro can be used as a tool to continue therapy outside of the clinic.
With each exercise, clinicians can customize them to their patient’s needs: difficulty, duration, response time, number of stimuli, and type of stimuli can be modified to create custom exercise plans for your patient. As your patient uses HappyNeuron Pro, you can view their progress and identify areas they are still struggling with to better focus your therapy sessions on those issues.
You can utilize our exercises to directly focus on specific areas of cognition your patient may be struggling with due to their injury.
Here are a few exercises that you could use:
The Towers of Hanoi
Trains temporal-spatial design skills and strategy
I Remember You!
Exercises short-term memory as well as teaching the patient to create mnemonics to remember relevant information.
Catch the Ladybug!
Trains concentration and visuospatial skills by requiring a patient to respond to relevant information while ignoring non-relevant stimuli in the environment.
Find Your Way
Teaches navigational skills while engaging the hippocampus.
Gulf Stream
Trains visual processing skills while engaging attention.
Seize the Keywords
Engages written comprehension skills while training memory of events, times, places, and associated emotions by focusing on key words and finding logical associations between them.
In addition, we provide exercises that focus on other domains of cognition such as Memory, Executive Function, Visual Memory, Processing Speed, the Auditory system, and Verbal Memory.
As you work with your client, you can identify overlapping cognitive issues that may be affected by their brain injury. With brain injury, some functions are left intact while others are severely disrupted, sometimes even gone. Our other exercises can assist with these complications, and you can address them in and outside of the clinical setting using HappyNeuron Pro.
How Do We Fit Into Your Practice?
Brain injuries are treated by a team of medical professionals, as brain injury impacts a patient’s physical, mental, and cognitive well-being. Early rehabilitation can occur bedside and continue as the patient is well enough to be discharged to their home or to a specialized care facility. Private practices through large hospitals and care homes integrate us as a tool to assist in rehabilitation post-injury.
For bedside intervention, a tablet or laptop can be used for the patient to engage with the software. For a larger setting outside of acute care, you can use tablets, laptops, or desktop computers. To do group work, you can connect an HDMI cord from the computer to a television screen to carry out a group session for brain injury survivors. Icebreakers for group settings include Split Words, Shapes and Colors, and Sleight of Hands. This can provide needed laughter and encourage patients to participate in therapy.
To experience first hand how we can help with your intervention for brain injury, try our 15 Day Free trial. You will have access to all of our exercises and resources and be able to create accounts for your patients to assign home exercises to be done.
Page last updated on Jun 19,2019
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