Enhancing Patient Engagement: The Development of Mirror Therapy Tasks for Stroke Rehabilitation

Background: Mirror therapy (MT) has been shown to improve upper extremity function in stroke rehabilitation. In MT, engaging patients in meaningful therapeutic exercise determines patients’ motivations and further the effectiveness of a rehabilitation program. The purpose of this study was to explore tasks that effectively enhance patient engagement in MT. Five participants with clinical and industrial design background were recruited to perform brainstorming activities for generating MT task ideas. All task ideas were evaluated by two rehabilitation specialists on the applicability based on the current MT protocol. Four task ideas (out of 74) were chosen by the two specialists and design recommendations were made for improving their feasibilities in MT. These ideas were: filling the blank with stamping tools (on magnetic board), spelling words with wooden letter dice, making patterns with black/white cubes, and making 3D shapes with clay. After identifying the potential task ideas, fifteen participants were recruited to assess the four developed MT tasks as well as five most-mentioned MT tasks in the literature using the User Engagement Scale (Short Form). One-way repeated measures ANOVA and pairwise comparisons were then conducted on participants’ rating scores. Results showed that participants’ rating scores for “filling the blank with stamping tools (on magnetic board)” as well as “making 3D shapes with clay” were significantly higher than those of five conventional MT tasks. The outcomes of the study benefit the communities of occupational therapy in the design of MT tasks.