Poster #77 - Virtual Technologies to Promote Physical Activity Outcomes for Children with Developmental Disability: A Systematic Review.

• In Event: Poster Session 19

Abstract

Background & Objectives:
Children with developmental disabilities (DD) (e.g., Autism Spectrum Disorder, Intellectual Disabilities, Down Syndrome and Developmental Coordination Disorder) often have concurrent problems in motor, social and cognitive domains which impact their development, participation within society, and overall quality of life (Bhat, 2021; Bhat et al., 2022). It is known that regular physical activity (PA) decreases the risk of physical / mental comorbidities and improves motor, cognitive, and social skill development; however, most children with DD do not meet the current recommendations for PA (Case, L., Ross, S., & Yun, J., 2020; Piercy, K. L. et al., 2018). In recent years, virtual technologies and video games are being increasingly used to promote PA and associated outcomes related to health, motor, social, and cognitive domains for individuals with DD. However, the efficacy of these virtual technologies to promote PA and associated effects vary based on the technology, setting in which it is used, and the population being studied. Furthermore, the effects of these virtual modalities in different developmental disorders including those with and without intellectual disability (ID) is not well understood. We conducted a systematic review/meta-analysis to comprehensively evaluate the evidence to date on the effectiveness of virtual technologies to promote physical activity in individuals with various developmental disorders, with and without intellectual disability.

Methods:
We conducted a search of four electronic databases: PubMed (818), PsycInfo (1197), SCOPUS (1394), and CINAHL (852). We included peer reviewed articles from 1900 to 2022 that had key terms such as: (a)“physical activity”, “exercise”, “physical education” and “fitness”, (b) “Autism Spectrum Disorder”, “Down Syndrome”, “developmental disability”, and “intellectual disability”, and (c) “telehealth”, “internet-based intervention”, “exergame”, “zoom delivered” and “virtual reality”. Prior to double coding all 2682 abstracts yielded from our search, an inter-rater reliability of higher than 90% was established among all authors for 100 abstracts. Articles were excluded if they were not published in English, had fewer than 5 subjects, were not interventions, were not a longitudinal design (less than two sessions of intervention), did not involve PA or virtual technologies, were not focused on our population of interest, or were feasibility studies not reporting system-related outcomes.

Results:
Our search criteria yielded 2682 articles. 27 met our inclusion criteria to be included in our review. Our review is currently ongoing over the next several months as we extract the study characteristics, intervention characteristics, outcome measures, treatment effects, conduct risk of bias analysis, and calculate other meta-analytic/effect size variables.

Conclusion:
We anticipate that this review will improve our understanding of the impact of virtual technologies to promote PA in individuals with DD with and without ID. We think that virtual technologies could be a low-cost addition that reduces barriers to participation in PA at home or in the community. Our results collected so far suggest that virtual technologies have proven to be effective for a wide range of clinical diagnoses and provide at least equal effects in promoting PA and other system improvements as compared to clinician-led approaches.

Authors

• Jacob Corey, University of Delaware
  Presenting Author

• Jungmei Tsai, University of Delaware

• Ashwin Mhadeshwar, University of Delaware

• Sudha M Srinivasan, University of Connecticut

• Anjana N Bhat, University of Delaware