Best Free Online "Therapy" Games

In this day and age its nice to have a few online therapy tools at your fingertips, so today after work I crawled the web to find the least obnoxious games you could recommend to a patient or client (or even a family member) who would benefit from participating in fine motor, calculations, vocabulary, problem solving games.

In no particular order...

Luminosity
www.luminosity.com
After hearing about this website from a few clients I logged on myself and discovered a fun way to track your progress (and cognitive state) daily.  Be warned: if you want to try it you have to enter in some details about yourself and set some goals (how OT!) as well as respond to an email in your inbox before you are allowed to play (or work).  In the free version you are allotted a few games a day and you can generally only play them once before you are moved along and finished your "training" for the day.  Or you can also pay a subscription fee to be a full member and have access to all the games on their system.


Maze Race
http://www.primarygames.com/puzzles/mazes/mazerace/
This game is significantly harder than most of the maze games I found online so if your client has fine motor difficulties they will find this game impossible.  If you are encouraging your client to use it for problem solving and cognitive flexibility it is a great choice - you are controlling a green ball with your arrow keys and racing the computer (a red ball) to the pin.  Your score depends on how fast you are and by how much you beat the computer - addictive!!!  Make sure to warn your client that they will have to watch a short advertisement before they can play.


Word Winder
http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/word-winder.jsp
This word game is one of the more challenging free ones out there - you can find easier ones that will have you "Boggle" your way through a jumble of letters to a timer but this one does that AND is like a crossword puzzle.  It will even give you a hint about the clue and then after that even fill in some of the letters so you can find it crossword style (linking the letters together) in the jumble.  There is a timer for competitive players, and bonus points are added if you finish without needing any hints and without running out of time.  Again, addictive!

Addition Aliens
http://www.addinggame.net/
This is a free online game that can help clients improve their addition and subtraction skills in addition to their fine motor coordination and processing speed.  The game is an arcade style space shooter game where players have to type the answer to the math problem, otherwise the aliens shoot at the buildings and depending on the level of difficulty your game is over.  There are four levels of difficulty for every level of ability.

Hope these games help some of your patients, there are so many out there let me know if you find any better ones!
Good luck!

Home Health Occupational Therapy: Its So Friggin' Functional

Today I went to a client's house for his weekly follow-up Occupational Therapy visit.  Having met a lot of our activity of daily living goals already we had started to focus in on progressing the strength and coordination of his non-dominant hand, which he had injured in a stroke event several months ago.  Luckily he regained full range of motion in his hand but his coordination and ability to do fine motor activities (tying shoelaces, buttoning a shirt...etc) is still lacking.

I had already decided to order him a Neuro Muscular Electrical Stimulation unit for his in-home use but until that arrived I wanted to continue to progress him towards full function by giving him ideas for functional tasks he could practice to improve his coordination and dexterity.  Because he is still the cook in the house I had instructed him last week to try balancing a saucepan full of water in his non dominant hand while walking laps on his deck; he would get feedback on his performance moment to moment from seeing the water move and he could struggle or fail at the task without causing a mess.

He laughed today as he told me that it hadn't gone very well, and that he was ready for any new ideas I had that didn't involve water and getting his shoes drenched.

We happened to be sitting at his dining room table with his laptop open in front of us; he had been checking his Email and Facebook and suddenly an idea hit me.  I asked him to move the  detachable mouse to his non dominant hand and navigate the browser window to search for a maze game we could try.  We found a free maze game at http://www.addictinggames.com/puzzle-games/clickmaze2.jsp and after watching a terrible ad for women's menstrual cycle products he got to try it.  After a few minutes of losing all three of his "lives" in 10 seconds he stopped to read the directions and voila...a new therapy tool was born!