Occupational therapy at home: what it is and how it works

Occupational therapist Irene Díaz González explains in this article her work, how she practices occupational therapy at home and how she integrates the NeuronUP platform into it.

My work as an occupational therapist is aimed at the elderly in the context of their home. I do occupational therapy at home. I perform a therapy adapted to the person, individualized and in an integral way, that is to say, I intervene in the area that the person needs.

As you know, the main objective of occupational therapy is to get the person to be as independent as possible in their activities of daily living. And what is this?

Activities of daily living:

Activities of daily living are all those activities that a person performs on a daily basis from getting up to going to bed.

They are everyday tasks such as:

• Personal care (feeding, dressing, bathing, maintaining hygiene when defecating, urinating, etc.), which includes basic ADLs.

We can say that these activities are essential to life, respond to more basic instincts, require a lower level of organization, and are simpler.

• Home care (cooking, organizing the house, shopping, washing, etc.) and other tasks (controlling medication, handling money, going on excursions, working, etc.), called instrumental ADLs.

These require a greater degree of organization than the previous ones (the basic ADLs) and vary according to the environment in which we move. Thus, for example, public transport is not handled the same way in a city as in a rural environment, and even the handling of money is different in both environments. We can say, then, that these activities are necessary for life in society.

Carrying out as many activities as possible is very important, because by carrying out tasks as simple as dusting or eating, at the same time we are reinforcing, maintaining or stimulating other very important aspects without realizing it:

• Create motivation when it comes to surpassing ourselves and carrying out activities in an autonomous way.
• Connect with our environment.
• Strengthen relationships with others and with ourselves.
• Work on reflexes.
• Coordinate the wide movements and also the precise ones.
• Exercise sensory perception through the senses.
• Orient ourselves in time, space and person.
• Promote cognitive abilities such as memory, attention, concentration, judgment, organization and problem solving.

With all of the above, the overall level of independence to carry out the activities of daily living is maintained.

The more activities we perform, the more we remain ourselves.

All this, I work in each occupational therapy session, with an individualized therapy and fully adapted to the person.

We will be more independent, the more activities we manage to do ourselves.

This is the best way to combat pathological aging, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or other diseases of advanced age. Patients and/or their families contact me because they show some difficulty in the performance of some activity of daily living. This difficulty may be reflected in one or more of the following functional components:

Functional Components:

1. Sensoriomotor Components:

• Neuromuscular Reflexes
• Postural control
• Motor coordination
• Activity Tolerance
• Knowledge through the senses
• Perceptual skills…

2. Cognitive Components and cognitive integration:

• Orientation,
• Recognition,
• Intellectual operations
• Problem solving
• Attention…

3. Psychological components and psychosocial skills:

• Interests and goals
• Values
• Concept of self
• Social (conversation, social behavior)…

Home occupational therapy with NeuronUP

As I have explained before, it can happen that a person is limited in some activity of daily life, and not because of something physical, but because of a cognitive problem. It may be, for example, that a person is not able to dress him/herself because he/she is not able to plan the order in which he/she will wear his/her clothes, or that he/she cannot cook because he/she does not remember well whether he/she has added salt to the food, or that he/she needs supervision when shopping because he/she does not handle money well.

All these examples, and those related to cognitive factors can be worked on online every day from home, thanks to NeuronUP2Go (NeuronUP home sessions).

Examples of activities to work on occupational therapy at home

1. Get Dressed

What does it consist of?

With the NeuronUP Dress Up activity we can virtually dress a character.

We are presented with different situations, such as going to bed, to the beach, to the mountains, and various items of clothing, which we must choose appropriately to the situation and place them on the character in the right order.

IMAGE

What does this activity work?

With this activity we work on the activity of dressing, planning, decision making and body schema.

2. Accurate payments

The activity proposed by NeuronUP, Acurrate Payments, is also very interesting.

What does it consist of?

This activity consists of calculating the exact amount of money. For example, they give you the amount of 159.96 € and you have to put the corresponding bills and coins to reach that amount.

What does this activity work?

This exercise works on shopping, working memory and planning.

And like these, many more activities that can be found on the platform. Thanks to the NeuronUP home sessions, I can schedule sessions for my patients with activities adapted in difficulty, depending on what they need.

The time of the pandemic has not been all bad, but it has taught us new ways of living. Among them, using the screen more to do online therapy. Undoubtedly, another opportunity for improvement.