What is Bimaual Therapy and Why do it?
Bimanual therapy is an intensive intervention for children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy who experience movement difficulties in one hand. It uses carefully planned, repeated practice of two-handed, or bimanual, games and activities to improve a child’s ability to use their hands together.
Additionally, the goal of proper hand function is not to use on hand alone, but to use the two hands together for activities requiring bimanual function (i.e. catching a ball, typing, cooking.)
Hand-Arm Bimanual Intensive Therapy (HABIT) in children with hemiplegia is a new intervention developed at Columbia University. HABIT aims to improve the use and coordination of both arms in daily function
Children can get very frustrated when their “good arm” is constrained, some to the point of regression of skills. Moreover, a child with other orthopedic impairments (such as limited ambulation) or cognitive delays, are at greater risk of falling and injuring their “good arm” during serial casting. HABIT, which does not use any serial casting whatsoever, eliminates these issues.
According to American Journal of Occupational Therapy, The results of studies suggest that performance of specific goals established by parents and that both CIMT and HABIT can be used to increase children’s daily functioning.
According to The Journal of Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine published research indicating that constraint-induced movement therapy (CIMT) and bimanual therapy for children with unilateral cerebral palsy are complementary to each other.
Some Pictures of Kyra Doing Bimanual
Bimanual Therapy for 1 year old Kyra was just play. It wasnt structured for her since we were already doing a lot more different types of therapies. We would just ask her to use both hands and give lot of verbal cues. Those verbal cues helped in later years.
