And closer to home, the UW Hospital and Clinics has made Wii Sports and Fit an integral part of its in-patient rehab program. Veteran Affairs hospitals around the country have reportedly adopted it, including the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where many combat veterans go to recover.
One of the first medical fields to latch onto the Wii was rehabilitation medicine. And it wasn’t long before members of the medical community took notice. He adds that controlling the action with body movements, rather than complex finger maneuvers, has made video gaming accessible to all kinds of nontraditional players, such as the elderly, and helped smash gaming’s image as an activity for coach potatoes. “The genius of the Wii, if you will,” says Shaffer, an expert in video gaming and its impacts, “is that (Nintendo) realized if you have a chance to use your body in more realistic ways, then the illusion of being in that fantasy world is stronger.” What makes it so compelling? Video gaming is all about entering a fantasy realm where you can do things that you can’t do in real life, and here the Wii simply excels, says UW–Madison educational psychology professor David Shaffer. And in March, Nintendo announced that global sales passed 50 million, making Wii the fastest-selling video-gaming system in history. video game industry strong during much of the past year. Despite a recent slump in sales, Wii has been credited with keeping the U.S. The console also offers traditional sit-down games, but it’s the active, easy-to-play Wii Sports and Fit that have created the biggest demand.
There’s also Wii Fit, in which players stand atop a device, similar to a large bathroom scale, that detects their shifts in weight as they strike yoga poses or twirl hula-hoops.Ĭontrolling game action with body movements, rather than complex finger maneuvers, has made video gaming accessible to all kinds of nontraditional players, such as the elderly, and helped smash gaming’s image as an activity for coach potatoes. Returning a serve in Wii tennis or hurling a Wii bowling ball requires arm swings much like those in the real games. Rather than controlling the game with a complicated set of buttons, players hold a motion-sensing remote that picks up their bodies’ movements. The Nintendo Wii.Įver since their debut in the late 1970s, video games have been knocked for promoting slack-jawed sloth. It was something, after all, they’d never seen in therapy before.
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The Friends of the UW Hospital and Clinics had just donated a new tool for physical therapy - so new, in fact, that the pair was puzzled about how to best use it. Things might have continued this way indefinitely, but then, in the fall of 2007, Stewart and Andrews got some hopeful news. “He kept getting readmitted and you could just see this was why. “It was troubling,” says Andrews, who first began working with the teen when he was 15. Still, he wasn’t doing much physical therapy and getting thinner and weaker all the time. Stewart got him to open up about his dream of becoming a tattoo artist, while fellow physical therapist Marcella Andrews also made strides by simply talking with him. Yet little by little she and her colleagues began to reach him. VideoĮverything - from his darkened room to his downcast eyes - said, “leave me alone,” recalls UW pediatric physical therapist Wendy Stewart. Angry with the nurses and therapists who swept in busily at all hours, pushing breathing treatments he hated and exercises he found silly.
Angry at his disease, which confined him to a room at American Family Children’s Hospital even though he was a young man. The 17-year-old with cystic fibrosis had been hospitalized repeatedly during his short life, and he was angry.
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