After a stroke, craniocerebral trauma, visual field failures, psychological disorders and other neurological deficits, cognitive training helps to retrain the performance of the brain. In practices and clinics, therapists do important work regarding brain performance. Therapists can additionally promote the rehabilitation of their patients by home training via the Internet. Clinical neuropsychologist Michael Preier explains how therapists use the method efficiently and how home training works for patients.

1. RehaCom
Internet Home
Training
How does it work?
Therapists ask - Neuropsychologist Michael Preier answers

3. Initial situation
Restitution therapy is based on the assumption that lost cognitive
abilities can be fully or partially regained through repeated training.
How does RehaCom internet home-training
work?

4. How does RehaCom Internet Home Training
work?
Computer-supported home training provides repetitive identical or similar
tasks with increasing difficulty: If, for example, a patient has slow reactions,
reaction training can be helpful. In such a training the patient must react
quickly when a certain symbol appears on the screen. The therapists can
create training schedules for home training and thus provide patients with
regular exercises. It has been proven that therapy frequency and duration
are decisive for the success of the therapy.

6. Initial situation
Patients with attention deficits often complain that they are no longer
able to cope with everyday life and need to take more frequent breaks
from mental activities. They are easily distracted and are quickly
overwhelmed in situations with many stimuli, e. g. in shopping centers.
Therapists should diagnose the different aspects of attention separately.
RehaCom-supported tests can measure reaction speed and processing.
Note:
Screenings are only available for the classic offline RehaCom version

7. Internet Home Training
In home training, computer-supported therapy programs promote
performance, for example, through tasks in which the patient must react
quickly to visual stimuli or audible sounds. This is how the processing
speed is trained, for example after a stroke. Exercises with search tasks
promote selective attention or spatial awareness.
Other exercises with search tasks train selective or spatial attention.

9. Initial situation
Patients with memory disorders find it difficult to remember
information in everyday life. Information reception (encoding),
storage or retrieval of information from memory can be impaired.
This causes a high level of suffering.

10. Patients learn to remember information better through deeper
processing (elaboration) or by applying strategies for learning
and recalling.
Example: Patients should remember words or pictures by
imagining terms visually or linking them to a story. When
remembering later, the patient uses these images to recall the
original terms. RehaCom-supported training at home promotes
the learning and practice of these strategies. The therapist adapts
the degree of difficulty of the task to the patient's level of
performance - at the beginning only a little information is
presented, but with ongoing therapy, more pictures, words or
contents are added.

12. Initial situation
Visuospatial neglect is a common attentional disorder resulting from
brain damage, most commonly from a stroke of the right hemisphere
but also from other conditions such as tumors or multiple sclerosis.
Patients with neglect pay little or no attention to the part of the brain
that is not effected by the brain injury, usually the left side.
For example, they overlook objects on one side of a table, bump into
other people, or find it difficult to read the beginning of a line.

13. The therapy directs the patient’s attention to the affected side. It begins
with simple tasks in which symbols or pictures are shown on a screen.
The patient should react as soon as a stimulus appears. Further
facilitating of the affected side can be promoted by adding moving points
(optokinetic stimulation).
Less severely affected patients train with more complex tasks in which
they search the screen for objects or count them.

15. What exercises can psychiatric patients
do at home?
Initial situation
RehaCom software can be helpful for many psychiatric conditions.
Many people with mental disorders suffer from concentration or memory
problems. E. g. patients with depression tend to brood over their
situation, which distracts them from their daily tasks, or they feel blocked
when they want to remember something. Others find it difficult to
distinguish important things from unimportant ones. This makes it difficult
to structure their everyday life.

16. What exercises can psychiatric patients
do at home?
How can RehaCom Home Training
help?
Home training can support the ability to concentrate, and can help to
facilitate planning and problem solving skills. RehaCom Home Training
offers many tasks for this purpose. For example patients are supposed
to create a schedule according to specifications in order to improve their
ability to plan. The tasks also help to set a fixed structuring of their day
and meaningful daily goals.

17. www.rehacom.com