Investigation of cognitive changes in cerebral palsy children employing different integrated sensing techniques

Abstract Background and purpose Cognitive impairment is one of the biggest challenges for cerebral palsy (CP) survivors. Cognition is a mental process, of acquiring knowledge and understanding the thoughts, experiences, and senses. It encompasses processes such as attention, knowledge, working memory, judgment and logical reasoning. The purpose of this study was to determine the most effective therapy for understanding the cognitive changes in children with CP from different available rehabilitation therapies being employed. Materials and methods A total of sixty participants divided into the four groups namely A, B, C and D (n=15) were recruited for the study. Groups A, B, C, and D received usual standard therapy (ST), repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (r-TMS), neurofeedback (NFB) and cognitive brain training exercises respectively for 20 days. Outcome measures such as Vineland Social Maturity Scale (VSMS) and raw EEG data were recorded before and after the completion of 20 days (5 days a week for 4 weeks) therapy as pre and post assessment data of these different groups, for statistical data analysis. Results The results suggested that r-TMS largely resulted in oriented therapy for cognitive enhancement in all selected therapy groups. Cognitive brain training exercises were found to be the second most effective as well as cost-effective therapy for cognitive enhancement in brain-damaged children. It showed 1.17% improvement in cognitive abilities as compared with r-TMS (1.28%) therapy. Conclusion All therapies showed some degree of significant improvement in cognitive enhancement, however, r-TMS and cognitive exercises were found to be the best among the studied rehabilitation therapies in different groups for cognitive enhancement in CP children. This one of the first study to the best of our knowledge using different intervention techniques such as rTMS, NFB and CE for understanding the changes in the cognitive development in the CP children.