Go baby go café: a case study on an immersive rehabilitation environment to improve functional outcomes and quality of life

Abstract

Purpose: To determine the effectiveness of involving traumatic brain injury survivors in a novel “enriched rehabilitation environment” in which physical, cognitive, social and speech impairments are simultaneously addressed during training within a functioning business.

Method: Participant was a 34-year old with a history of a severe head injury 17 years ago due to a motor vehicle accident. A novel intervention was provided within the Go Baby Go Café at the University of Delaware during her two hour shifts, three times a week for 2 months.

Results: The participant showed improvement in hand function, dynamic mobility, gait speed and cognitive ability. Additionally, changes were also noted across different domains like social activities, feeling of well-being, gross motor function and quality of life.

Conclusions: The Café may be a viable environment for comprehensive intervention. Participation in the Café was associated with wide spread gains in scores on a variety of physical, cognitive, quality-of-life outcomes.

Implications for rehabilitation

• Long-term impairments after traumatic brain injury often impairs activities of daily living, community integration and return to work.

• The Go Baby Go Café, installed with an overhead harness system serves as an “Immersive Environment” to address various impairments all at once in a real-world setting.

• Individuals with impairments can benefit from this rehabilitation technique, which is structured to improve changes across the International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health spectrum.

Keywords:

• Enriched environment
• immersive rehabilitation
• traumatic brain injury
• rehabilitation
• go baby go café
• mobility
• quality of life

Acknowledgements

We thank the TBI survivor and her family for their time and participation in this study. We also thank Barry Bodt for his insight and expertise in Biostatistics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The Go Baby Go Café is currently being funded by the UNIDEL 140 grant of the University of Delaware.