Hey,
Has anyone used the wii as an assessment tool? My target population is children with disabilities.
any information will be helpful

The Wiihabilitation site links to abstracts of academic papers about using the Wii and WiiFit in a rehabilitation setting. My personal advice would be to stick to the more 'gamey' activities in the WiiFit (most of the balance and cardio games). They'd be more fun for kids.

Hi there.

I'd avoid trying to use the Wii Fit as an assessment tool, at least avoid the fitness test completely. The use of BMI as it's main measurement makes it somewhat controversial when used on adults, and to be avoided entirely with kids. Wii Fit can be pretty harsh when you are an adult, I wouldn't subject a child to it's brutally objective assessments.

Having said that, there is nothing stopping you from recording progress on individual games that are appropriate for the individual child's situation. I would think that the objective scores for many of the games could give you good feedback on a child progress, at least as far as the very specialised world of the game is concerned. It has the added advantage that it won't feel like a formal assessment to a child, it's just a fun game.

Hi mdala,
I have struggled with this myself - assessing the use of the Wii Fit with patients. There are sooooo many variables even when using the balance games. If you have visited my website <thanks qwertygirl264!> then you might pick up a few ideas, but generally I would say its best to used an 'official' measure (GMFM as an obvious example) then use the aspects of the Wii Fit to try and improve those areas.

I work with slightly older disabled people (young adults) and find that one of the better aspects of the Wii is that it offers them some cardiovascular exercise - games like Wii Sports Boxing, Samba de Amigo plus others. These games offer an easy opportunity to measure HR, recovery times or Borgs rate of perceived exertion score.

Its one of the things that frustrates me about Nintendo - all the data/information we could ever want as physios is all locked up in the game. Without the means to extract it we are left with attempts to record (mostly) subjective outcomes. I have, with a few patients, taken photos of screen shots as regards to the line of their centre of gravity - especially on the yoga breathing. You then have the problem of how to store that data....

I'm looking forward to Wii Fit Plus coming out on Friday - it will increase the option of balance games available to us to use with in sessions, and more variety often means more/prolonged interest from patients.