For the last 9 weeks, LuLu has been using Interactive Metronome. Our occupational therapist comes two times a week to administer this brain-based intervention.

What is Interactive Metronome?

The Interactive Metronome is an intervention that focuses on rhythm and timing and helps to build a person’s motor planning and sequencing abilities. As defined by the Interactive Metronome website:

The IM program is an intervention where the patient is challenged to synchronize a range of hand and foot exercises to a precise computer-generated reference tone heard through headphones. The patient attempts to match the rhythmic beat with repetitive motor actions.

A patented audio or audio and visual guidance system provides immediate feedback measured in milliseconds, and a score is provided.

Over the course of the treatment, patients learn to: focus and attend for longer periods of time, increase physical endurance and stamina, filter out internal and external distractions, improve ability to monitor mental and physical actions as they are occurring, and progressively improve performance.

Wow! LuLu needs these things for sure …focusing longer, increasing stamina, filtering out distractions…she could use a boost in all those areas.

When we started IM, our OT did a pre-test that indicated that LuLu’s score was 192 milliseconds, which put her in the “severe deficiency” category or on par with about a 2-year-old. The pre-test also showed that her responses were ‘early” 73% of the time, indicating a high degree of impulsivity – no surprise there.

So twice a week she does an hour of IM exercises which include tapping with either her foot onto a floor trigger or hitting her hand onto a surface or her body while wearing a palm sensor, or sometimes both (usually a bilateral move). The exercises increase in duration/number of repetitions. LuLu never refuses to do them, but as they’ve increased in repetition, she finds them more difficult.

What’s the science behind IM?

Based on the science of brain plasticity, neurologists and those who work with them are recognizing that the brain has a huge capacity to grow and change. Research indicates that poor motor planning and sequencing ability can impair a person’s:
• Attention or concentration
• Motor control
• Balance
• Language processing
• Impulsivity.

Several areas of the brain appear to be involved in motor processing, specifically auditory motor processing. These brain structures (many of them at the midbrain level – including the cingulate gyrus) are shown to have increased blood flow during a fMRI while the subjects were doing IM activities. And other studies have shown that students’ math and reading fluency by over one grade level. Children with ADHD have been shown to have significant improvements in attention, motor control, language processing, reading and their ability to regulate aggression. (See the article in the March/April 2001 American Journal of Occupational Therapy, Vol. 55, No 2.)

Interactive Metronome has improved attention, impulsivity and reading and math fluency for children with ADD/ADHD, Aspergers Syndrome, Sensory Integration Dysfunction and Cerebral Palsy.

Interactive Metronome is also used for adults who have had a brain injury or illness such as stroke, traumatic brain injury or Parkinsons Disease.

IM Certified providers include occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech and language professionals and educators. You can use IM’s website to find one in your area.

We’re excited about the progress that LuLu seems to be making with IM. The test scores are increasing. Behaviorally we are starting to see some changes in the area of attentiveness and perhaps a bit in impulsivity…but we are hoping for even more as her “scores continue to go down”.