New Partnerships Between Dance and Neuroscience: Embedding the Arts for Neurorecovery
Authors: Worthen-Chaudhari Lise C. 
Published: July 2014

Neurorehabilitation applies neuroscience and motor control principles for a pragmatic purpose: to affect the recovery of individuals who have experienced a central nervous system injury. The success or failure of these principles and their application hold life-changing consequences for individuals with neural injury. While art, music and dance therapy are sometimes offered to patients as adjunctive therapy, few attempts have been made to embed the arts within traditional rehabilitation programmes despite preliminary evidence that such implementation improves clinical outcomes. This paper presents the rationale for embedding specific dance-based training techniques within standard rehabilitation protocols.

The Embedded Arts project for acute care of brain and spinal cord injury at Dodd Rehabilitation Hospital uses motion capture technology to highlight the personal nature of prescribed rehabilitative movement and to document the recovery process. Lightweight sensors detect patient movement and custom programmes enable the translation of rehabilitative movement performed in the clinic into artistically-enhanced feedback and digital documentation. Patients perform standard physical medicine exercise prescriptions while using Embedded Arts technology; however, we seek to highlight the patient's performance of those exercises as a personal, creative movement practice that is as akin to dance practice as it is to the traditional rehabilitation experience. The relationship to dance goes beyond empowering the patient to make standard exercises into a personal performance experience, however, because it also concerns the way movement exercises are taught and learned. Using learning through imagery (also known as analogy learning) and creative movement generative practices often employed by dance educators, we seek to translate exercises that are generally taught with explicit instructional methods into implicit training exercises. Finally, our approach fosters creativity and play through use of interactive arts technology, to link movement (even in very restricted form) with the production of visual images.

There are at least four ways in which embedding the arts in existing rehabilitation protocols may aid the recovery of people who have experienced central nervous system injury. First, embedding the arts and gaming within standard therapy may improve patient engagement and improve adherence to exercise prescriptions. Second, infusing rehabilitation exercises with creative process practices has the potential to tap into implicit process, which has consequences for inducing neural plasticity. Third, patient and clinical treatment teams can track progress of recovery via the created images (e.g. duration of task performance, smoothness, range and speed of motion). Fourth, exploring the creative nature of personal movement in a rehabilitation setting can potentially shift attentional focus in positive ways for people coping with recent, life-changing injuries.

This paper serves to introduce key concepts from dance and neurorehabilitation, and information about our specific, project-based process, with the aim of facilitating other such partnerships between the disciplines. For dance and for rehabilitation medicine, movement is both method and result. In the rehabilitation paradigm, movement is medicine. In the dance paradigm, movement is art. Often, a single movement can be both. Perhaps, through this phenomenon of movement, the arts and medicine are more interdependent than we previously imagined. More study is needed to explore the impact of creative process and dance movement training techniques on stimulating neuromotor plasticity and improving rehabilitation outcomes.