Biometrics Lab – Biofeedback

That odd contraption clamped to the table is what takes on all the attachments.
Here is the program.

Here are just a few of the many pieces you can use with tihs program.
Here I am about to play a spaceship game with my cheeks.

On October 4th, I am doing a 2 hour presentation on Biofeedback with Meg and Emily. Our professor told us that he was driving a man in from Louisiana to give us a session on Biofeedback. This kind of freaked us out, since we worried our professor was maybe expecting a LOT from us if he would take the time and money to have someone spend hours with just the three of us.

Last Thursday, the man drove in (representing Biometrics), and he spent three hours showing Meg, Emily, and I a program that costs over 20,000 DOLLARS!!!!!!!!!!! The program was amazing! You installed it on your computer via USB port, and then there was all this equipment that attached to the computer, a hub, and your BODY.

Basically, you could play 19 different games with virtually any body part. I played a space-ship game with my cheek muscles by controlling my smile. I did pretty badly since it was so hard!

You could use attachment pieces that included rods and disks, to work on range of motion with the various games. If you only had a few degrees of range, you could play the game within that range. You didn’t even necessarily have to play games though. There were goniometers and dynamometers and force plates that were attached to the hub that you could use to digitally record ROM or grip strength. One of the huge advantages of this program is that it can really weed out fakers in workman’s comp. When a person is actively trying to fake weakness, they can get away with it. But with some of these games or rapid-motion stuff, it would be almost impossible to mask your full strength!

You could also use EMG by attaching electrodes to the skin on top of muscles anywhere on the body, and then play the games just using muscle activation! It was so much fun!

This program was basically the coolest thing I’ve ever seen and I can’t wait to play with it some more. Our biofeedback presentation is going to be awesome because we basically get to show everyone how to play games for an hour of the presentation! That’s not to say it’s not valid – you can really work on strength and ROM, getting really precise measurements and also making it fun enough that the patient is distracted from their pain and willing to keep working!

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Today in class we learned about Chiropractic care, Massage Therapy, the Caregiver Burden Scale Assessment, Therapeutic Handling including Ribcage Handling, and a few other random things. I also made a video with Stephanie on VALPAR administration in preparation for our presentation Monday. Tomorrow we have a lab in ribcage handling, I’ll be sure to get back to y’all soon with that. I’ve decided to save the AAC Lab post for tomorrow since I’m going cross-eyed at the computer and still have work left to do. I did get a LOT done this afternoon though, I’ve been very productive!

I also got e-mail today from a MOT student named Heather in Nashville, she said she was going to share this blog with her classmates. I encouraged her to start a class blog or individual blog. Shout-out to Nashville. 🙂

Sep 18, 2007 | Category: Occupational Therapy | Comments: 2