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Winda Benedetti

'Fruit Ninja' helps stroke patients slice through recovery

One of the many difficult things about recovering from a stroke is that doing the hard, tedious rehabilitative work is, well, boring.

But a neuroscientist in Australia has found a new way to help spice up the recovery — with the medicinal powers of the game "Fruit Ninja."

In fact, Sydney-based neuroscientists Stuart Smith and Penelope McNulty of Neuroscience Research Australia are using a number of iPad, Kinect and Wii games to make the physical exercises stroke patients need to do far less frustrating and boring.

One game Smith, in particular, has had a lot of success with is the iPad version of "Fruit Ninja," he told The Australian newspaper.

The game tasks players with sliding their fingers across the screen in an attempt to cut airborne fruit as quickly and accurately as possible. The frequent rapid precision wrist movements used to slice the virtual fruit mimic the exercises used in fine motor-skills therapy, Smith explained.

Smith said he has also started to use the new "Fruit Ninja Kinect" game for the Xbox 360 — which tasks players with using their hands and arms to slice the flying fruit — for both stoke and spinal cord rehabilitation.

Meanwhile, McNulty is running a stroke rehabilitation trial using Nintendo Wii games. And she says the patients are responding very well to the prescription.

"We've found that most of our patients actually do more than what we ask of them," McNulty said. "In traditional therapy, it's a struggle to get people to do the minimum amount. [This] is a lot of fun, so people enjoy doing it. Therefore, they do the hours they need to do to gain the benefit."

This is not the first time virtual reality and video games have been used to help patients recover from injuries and illness. University of Washington researchers Sam Sharar and Hunter Hoffman have been using specially-made virtual reality-based video games to help patients manage pain.

But Smith points out that consumer-grade diversions like "Fruit Ninja" are both low-cost and also already familiar to patients, which is helpful in the recovery process.

Meanwhile, McNulty points out that they aren't just hanging around, playing games with patients and calling it rehabilitation.

"We use it in a very structured, formalized way," she said. "We give them specific movement strategies to work on."

(Thanks to Game Politics and The Australian for the heads up.)

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Winda Benedetti writes about games for msnbc.com. You can follow her tweets about games and other things here on Twitter or join her in the stream here on Google+. And be sure to check out the In-Game Facebook page here.