More research on effects of weighted vests on attending behaviors.

I was very happy to see another article on weighted vests in the current issue of AJOT (Lin, Lee, Chang, and Hong, 2014).  The last opportunity we had to look at this issue was the excellent pilot study completed by Collins and Dworkin and published in the November/December 2011 AJOT.  In that study (reviewed here) the authors found that the weighted vests were not effective in increasing time on task, but cautioned that the results should be generalized cautiously owing to the small sample size and participant selection process.The current study, completed by colleagues in Taiwan, employed a much more rigorous randomized and two period crossover design with a much larger sample of children.  110 children participated in the study that measured their performance on the Conners' Continuous Performance Test and recorded behaviors during weighted and non-weighted vest wearing conditions.The researchers made good attempts to control for bias by blinding the video coders to the weighted vs. non-weighted condition.  Additionally, the Conners itself is an objective measurement of attending skills.  They also used the two group design that presented the weighted vs. non-weighted conditions in reverse order to control for practice effect.  Finally, age and gender were non-factors despite the random assignment.The children wearing the weighted vests made fewer omission errors and had improved response time.  The omission error rate is something that h...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - Category: Occupational Therapists Tags: evidence-based practice OT practice school-based practice Source Type: blogs