How ASPAYM CyL Uses NeuronUP to Address All the Center’s Specialties

In this article, Raquel Vicente Fernández and Onil Gutiérrez Martín, from the ASPAYM CyL team in Burgos, present ASPAYM Castilla y León’s experience using NeuronUP across different specialties.

About ASPAYM Castilla y León

ASPAYM Castilla y León is a neurorehabilitation center that offers specialized, personalized care to people who have suffered brain injury, whether due to an accident, illness, or injury. We have a multidisciplinary team of qualified professionals who all work closely together to design and implement recovery programs tailored to each patient’s needs.

This year, our Burgos center celebrated its tenth anniversary. Since opening in 2015, the organization has worked to improve the quality of life of people with disabilities in the province, becoming a leading center for neurological rehabilitation and comprehensive care.

The ASPAYM CyL professional team in Burgos

Our neurorehabilitation center has a highly specialized multidisciplinary team. The coordinated work of our different disciplines allows us to approach rehabilitation comprehensively, centered on the person and their needs.

Our team includes: 

• Speech-language pathologists: responsible for assessing and treating language, speech, voice, communication, and swallowing disorders. Their intervention is essential in cases of aphasia, dysarthria, dysphagia, and other disorders resulting from neurological injuries.
• Physical therapists: specialists in recovering movement, strength, balance, and gait. They use specific techniques to treat motor and neuromuscular impairments, promoting functional independence.
• Occupational therapists: they work to help people return to their activities of daily living (such as dressing, grooming, or cooking), using functional interventions, environmental adaptations, and assistive devices.
• Neuropsychologists: they assess and treat cognitive impairments (memory, attention, executive functions, etc.) and behavioral changes. They also provide emotional support, accompanying the person and their family through the process of adjusting and coping.
• Social workers: they act as a link between the family, social, and healthcare environments. They provide guidance on social resources, support with applying for assistance, and advice on social and work reintegration.

We also have an adult day center specializing in neurorehabilitation. This space offers daily therapeutic activities, cognitive, physical, and functional interventions, support, and constant stimulation in a safe, motivating environment.

ASPAYM CyL specialties in Burgos

Below, we describe not only the different disciplines at ASPAYM Castilla y León’s Burgos center but also how each one integrates NeuronUP into its daily practice. 

Speech therapy

In our speech therapy service, we use NeuronUP as a complementary tool to enhance therapeutic intervention, especially in cases of aphasia and dysarthria.

Before starting, we identify each patient’s specific areas of difficulty, such as comprehension, expression, naming, articulation, reading and writing, and verbal fluency. Based on the results, we design training tailored to each patient. NeuronUP offers a variety of exercises we can select and modify to work on aspects such as memory, attention, language, and oral motor skills. 

In cases of aphasia, for example, we can work on recovering vocabulary, comprehension, and expression. In dysarthria, we focus on improving articulation and orofacial motor coordination through activities that stimulate fine motor skills and coordination.

Because the platform offers an interactive, playful environment, patients are motivated to take an active part in their recovery, which is essential for maintaining interest and consistency in sessions.

Occupational therapy

In our Occupational Therapy Department, we use NeuronUP as a tool to support our usual treatment of patients with acquired brain injury (ABI). 

After the initial assessment, we can identify which occupational areas have been affected, specify which tasks the person needs support or rehabilitation with, and analyze which abilities are limiting our patient’s functioning. 

This is where NeuronUP, with its many programmable activities, allows us to strengthen the cognitive and perceptual abilities involved in activities of daily living (ADLs), providing, through its learning environments:

1. The opportunity to offer a meaningful therapeutic experience.
2. A more realistic context (especially when intervention in the natural setting isn’t possible or when we are working on skills before they can be generalized).
3. And better participation in instrumental activities of daily living. 

It is a great ally for working on perceptual impairments such as attentional hemineglect and learned non-use of the affected side, for example.

Activities of Daily Living (ADLs): definition, classification, and exercises

It supports good patient adherence to treatment thanks to:

1. The variety of exercises available; 
2. Its game-like nature;
3. The ability to adapt the complexity of the tasks (through size, timing, number of stimuli, etc.); 
4. And the ability to monitor progress, which is then shared with patients and families.

Physical therapy

In physical therapy, it is possible to reinforce cognitive functions that are essential for motor performance, such as attention, memory, planning, and executive functions, among others. This approach helps give continuity to the interventions carried out by other disciplines.

After an acquired brain injury, the ability to perform dual tasks (doing two tasks with different, independent goals at the same time) is often impaired, particularly affecting how much attention is devoted to each one. 

In this context, the NeuronUP platform offers the possibility of specific dual-task training, prioritizing cognitive activity over postural control.

It also allows us to work on other relevant aspects, such as head orientation, maintaining the midline, gaze fixation, and eye-hand coordination. All of this is done in a playful environment, with the ability to adjust the difficulty level to each patient’s individual needs.

Clinical case: integrating AAC with NeuronUP to treat aphasia

Below is the case of a patient with an initial diagnosis of global aphasia that progressed to severe Broca’s aphasia. As a result, the patient’s communication is severely impaired, especially in initiation and spontaneity. His speech is not fluent, with pauses to search for words and anomia. His grammar is extremely simple, and his style is telegraphic.

We have been working for an extended period with an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system as a support tool to compensate for the difficulties in verbal expression resulting from his neurological injury, allowing the patient to communicate functionally. Our aim is to preserve and strengthen the patient’s communication skills, and to do this, we combine this intervention with NeuronUP. 

Working this way:

• We reinforce communicative intent: even though the patient can’t say the word, he keeps taking part in the conversation using AAC.
• We stimulate vocabulary acquisition: by using the word in AAC while working with NeuronUP, we reinforce the word-meaning association.

Thanks to the work with the platform, new vocabulary emerges, which we use to review and expand the AAC system.

We have currently selected the following activities as a communication stimulus:

• Activities aimed at strengthening the relationship between concepts and their visual representations, supporting vocabulary retrieval and making expression easier.
• Building simple sentences: exercises for putting words in order to form coherent sentences, supporting the organization of expressive language in a visual, structured way.
• Choosing the correct answer: the patient has to select the right word or image for the context shown.
• We also include functional attention and memory activities.

Some NeuronUP activities are:

• Matching Nouns to Images, worksheets for working on vocabulary in which users have to match each noun with the image that represents it.
• Organize the House, worksheets for training spatial orientation. They involve working out where in the house different objects would go.
• Half-hidden objects, worksheets for working on visual gnosis and semantic memory in which users have to recognize partially covered objects and select those that meet the requirement given.
• Objects, places and professionals, worksheets for training spatial orientation and shopping, in which users have to match different objects with the places where they are obtained and the professionals in charge of them.
• Household Objects. These are also worksheets for working on spatial orientation. In this case, users have to work out where in the house different objects would go.
• Naming Objects with Phonological Cues, worksheets aimed at training naming that involve naming objects with the help of phonological cues.
• Correct Image Name, discrimination worksheets in which users have to pick out the word that matches the image shown. 
• And many more.

After a period of intervention using the combined AAC and NeuronUP approach, we have seen an improvement in the functional communication skills of our patient with severe Broca’s aphasia. We have seen:

1. Greater communicative initiative, 
2. more accuracy when selecting words or images, 
3. greater participation in communication tasks, both in therapy and in everyday settings, 
4. and less communication-related frustration. 

Integrating AAC with NeuronUP in speech therapy creates a therapeutic synergy that significantly supports the communication rehabilitation of patients with aphasia. The speech therapy team at ASPAYM Burgos recommends it as a therapeutic strategy for expressive language disorders.

Thanks to combined work with the NeuronUP platform and the LetMe Talk app, when the Boston Naming Test was administered, the patient was able to retrieve all the words presented independently. This independence in searching for and retrieving vocabulary shows that these supports are successful in his therapy, since they increase his functional communication skills and significantly expand his vocabulary.

Conclusion

We firmly believe in the value of coordinated work and in using innovative tools that help us provide individualized, effective, evidence-based care. That’s why we use NeuronUP as a key support platform in our intervention.

If you enjoyed this article on how ASPAYM uses NeuronUP across all the center’s specialties, you may also be interested in these NeuronUP articles:

“This article has been translated. Link to the original article in Spanish:”
Cómo utiliza ASPAYM CyL NeuronUP para trabajar todas las especialidades del centro