Stroke Victims Playing Wii to Help Recovery

In the unlikely event that the public gets utterly tired of a novel new system of play, the Wii just might find a home in hospitals across the world.

Victims of stroke, for instance, have found it to be useful in helping them to rehabilitate the movement back into their arms and legs.

“Because of the interaction of the game, I get the physical sensation of playing tennis,” Jerry Pope said in a recent article in the Winston Salem Journal. “It really works. It can fool me into thinking that I’m doing what’s happening on the screen.”

Pope has been using the Wii as part of an interactive recovery program at Sister Kenny Rehabilitation Institute at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis. According to Nintendo, this is not a singular event in the field of medicine.

“We’ve seen reports of soldiers returning from Iraq using Wii as part of their rehab and a way to help them heal,” Perrin Kaplan, Nintendo’s vice president of marketing and corporate affairs, said in the article. “We’ve heard directly from several cancer patients telling us the Wii is an integral part of their recovery and rehabilitation, and it makes a huge difference in their spirits. It’s especially helpful when most of the people using it for these kinds of reasons can’t get out of their homes easily.”

Kudos to you, Nintendo. Not only have you made drinking games a whole lot more fun, you’ve also managed to help along medicine as well.

via Winston-Salem Journal