Dyslexia Telerehabilitation during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results of a Rhythm-Based Intervention for Reading.

The COVID-19 outbreak necessitated a reorganization of the rehabilitation practices for Learning Disorders (LDs). During the lockdown phase, telerehabilitation offered the possibility to continue training interventions while enabling social distancing. Given such an advantage of telerehabilitation methods for LDs, clinical research is still needed to test the effectiveness of diverse teletraining approaches by comparing their outcomes with those of face-to-face interventions. To compare the effectiveness of telerehabilitation vs. in-presence rehabilitation of dyslexia, a rhythm-based intervention for reading, called Rhythmic Reading Training (RRT), was tested in a small-scale clinical trial during the lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thirty children aged 8-13 with a diagnosis of developmental dyslexia were assigned to either a telerehabilitation or an in-presence rehabilitation setting and received RRT for 10 biweekly sessions of 45 min, supervised by a trained practitioner. The results showed that both telerehabilitation and in-presence rehabilitation were effective in improving reading and rapid automatized naming in children with dyslexia and that the effects were comparable between settings. Therefore, RRT was found to be effective in spite of the administration method (remote or in-presence). These results confirm the potential of telemedicine for the rehabilitation of LDs. Clinical Trial ID: NCT04995471.

Telerehabilitation and Wellbeing Experience in Children with Special Needs during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic represented a golden opportunity to implement telerehabilitation for clinical groups of children. The present study aims to show the impact that telerehabilitation had on the experience of well-being of children with special needs being treated at the Foundation IRCCS Neurological Institute 'C. Besta' in Milan (Specific Learning Disorders and Cerebral Palsy diagnosis); it aims to do so by comparing it with experiences of those who did not undertake telerehabilitation despite the diagnosis during the pandemic, and with typically developing children. Results show that the three groups differed in the Support, Respect and Learning dimensions of well-being experience. Post hoc comparisons revealed that children with Specific Learning Disorders and Cerebral Palsy scored higher than normotypical children in Support and in Respect scales. Furthermore, children who experienced telerehabilitation showed the highest scores on the Learning scale in comparison with the other two groups. These results support the importance of reorganizing care and assistance by integrating telemedicine, which seems to have fostered a positive experience of well-being in people with special needs, particularly in the perception of a supportive environment that respects psychological needs.