Simultaneous use of sensory stimulation and motor exercise improves the manual skills of educable children with mental retardation at preprimary and primary school levels

Children with mental retardation have various clinical problems. They mostly have motor delay and sensory deficit. Neurorehabilitation focuses on restoring remaining abilities. Thus, the present study was designed to study the effects of simultaneous use of sensory-motor therapy on manual skills of children with mental retardation. Methods: In this study, 120 educable boys and girls with mental retardation (9-12 years) were selected from 2 preprimary and primary exceptional centers in Tehran using stratified sampling method considering the geographical dispersion. The participants were divided into 2 equal trial and control groups using simple random sampling. Lincoln-Oseretsky Motor Development Scale, Purdue Pegboard test, and Handwriting Legibility Checklist of Persian Language were used. Simultaneous sensory stimulations and motor exercises were used for 3 one-hour weekly sessions for 12 consecutive weeks. Pre and posttests were done for evaluation. Using parametric paired and independent samples t tests, the findings were analyzed in SPSS 23. Results: The manual skills significantly improved following therapeutic use of simultaneous sensory stimulation and motor exercise (p=0.001). In the control group, the pre and post evaluation difference was not significant (p=0.813) Conclusion: Based on the findings of this study, simultaneous use of sensory-motor techniques can have better clinical results in the trial group compared to the control group. Thus, these types of techniques should be used more in clinics. However, further studies are needed for more comparison between separate applications of these techniques.