Jeff Miller/UW-Madison
A young boy diagnosed on the autism spectrum stands on a Wii Connect balance board practicing a ski jump pose. Brittany Travers, assistant professor in kinesiology (left), improvised a board she got as a Christmas present into a lab tool.
Balance is like breathing. It’s essential, and we take it for granted when it comes easily. Without a reliable sense of balance dressing, cooking, driving and many job skills become exhausting tasks.
Balance is often a challenge for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Now a research team at UW-Madison’s Waisman Center is using ninja warriors and Wii Fit video games to look at the problem, with the hope that improving the balance of kids with autism would have a positive impact on their symptoms by changing the brain.
“When we balance, our brains are taking in so many different signals,” says Brittany Travers, professor in the UW Department of Kinesiology occupational therapy program. “We are all constantly making these fine-tuned movement adjustments. It’s a full-body thing, and if one part is having problems with the signals it’s getting, then the whole body system has to adjust for it.”
As a graduate student, Travers improvised the Wii balance board she got for Christmas into a lab tool to determine that people with ASD who had poorer balance also had more severe autism symptoms. By combining electronic monitoring with balance training, Travers is hoping to break new ground in understanding the effects of ASD, and how it can be modified.
The brain stem has long been known to contribute to balance, and Travers and her team really wanted to be able to scan this part of the brain in children with ASD.
“Previous research indicated that our subjects needed to stand on a wobbling board for an hour each week for six weeks,” says Travers. “But how were we going to get kids with autism to do that? It looked hard and boring, a really bad combination for children. We had to find a way to make it fun.”
She found her answer in research showing that children with autism tend to spend more time playing video games than their peers.
“We wanted to see if we could train balance through video games,” says Travers. “With Wii Fit coming out, it was doable, but we needed a more concentrated game that was more applicable to autism, so we came up with our own game that can be individualized at each person’s level. We call it our ninja training games.”
The game features six different ninja poses. As a shadow appears on the screen, the kids being tested fit themselves into the pose they see on the screen. “There is very little language necessary,” Travers explains. “Dots appear on the screen at different joints. When you are inside the shadow, they are yellow, and a green light turns on at the bottom. When you are out of the shadow, your dots are red.”
“It’s a lot of focus on ninja,” says Travers. “You stand in one position for from five seconds to four minutes, and by the end, that can get tiring and boring, so we have added other Wii games in the middle to keep it fresh.”
While the ninja test subjects are training, Travers and her team are able to get real-time video of movement data, and in some cases, they also study change in brain structures, specifically the white matter of the brain stem.
“We have eight adolescents and 13 younger children helping us with our study, and we are still recruiting,” says Travers. “The results are promising, but we are in the middle of the study and still analyzing data.”
Whether or not this research results in ways to modify ASD, Travers says, “improving balance can help with independent living skills. In research, it’s one baby step at a time.”