Annual Tech for your Health Section
By Lucy Morris
What Is Bioness Integrated Therapy System?
Bioness Integrated Therapy System, or BITS, is an interactive touchscreen tool created to help improve function in individuals who have suffered brain injuries, strokes, or other disorders that affect movement. Designed to make therapy feel more like “play” than “work,” BITS helps keep patients engaged in their treatment plans as they work toward their rehabilitation goals.
Who Might Need BITS?
Patients struggling following a stroke or other traumatic brain injury can benefit from training with BITS. When a brain injury occurs, memory, attention, communication, and visual perception can be affected. BITS can help patients achieve enhanced hand-eye coordination, improved peripheral vision, improved cognitive endurance and memory recall, and increased visual search and scanning abilities, among others.
How Does BITS Work?
BITS features six therapy categories that encompass four standardized assessments and 24 unique programs. Each program offers increasing levels of difficulty that can be tailored to an individual’s needs and abilities.
Therapist and patient work together to select an activity and set an appropriate level of difficulty that is both attainable yet challenging. Performance is measured throughout the activity so that the therapist can make adjustments in real-time. At the end of the activity, the program will complete a progress report to help track patient progress over time.
Benefits of BITS
Thanks to advancements in technology, occupational therapy treatment continues to move toward individualization. Since the BITS technology enables patients to work on their specific core deficits in an interactive and progressive environment, they can see a quicker improvement in function than they might with traditional therapy.
Further, by allowing immediate feedback, BITS helps motivate and encourage users to continually push for improved results. Therapists can also use the results to determine when to increase difficulty or which areas need additional training. Not to mention the numerous program modes and options allow for highly specialized training and keep users engaged.
