Understanding and improving navigation to enhance autonomy in children with cerebral palsy: a pilot trial.

The aim of this study was to analyse the navigation in development of children with cerebral palsy. Secondly, we wonder if the intensive therapy HABIT-ILE has any effect on navigation. To allow analysis, we created a game where children realise specific trajectories in a natural manner. Their displacements were filmed by 3 Go-pro cameras. Moreover, to retrieve data, we designed a software able to compute the position of the children when moving in a 3D environment. Data of interest was the variability of trajectory because it is a good indicator to study navigation. The first part was analysing healthy children. We found a well-known trend; namely that the variability decreases with age and expresses the maturation of navigation. In the second part, we investigated the navigation of children with CP. In order to do this, they performed the game before HABIT-ILE therapy and once after it. We were able to compare with healthy children and extract the CP navigation characteristics: the trend that variability decreases with age is also present, but the variability is much higher than for healthy children. To see the effect of this intensive therapy, we compared the PRE session and the POST session of camp. We discovered a significant positive result. While this improvement may not totally be due to the therapy, we hypothesized that HABIT-ILE has a significant positive influence on variability, and hence on navigation.