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Can you talk a little bit about sensory integration issues and some things that may help?


Occupational Therapist

After brain injury, your somatic sensory system can be affected and that's really a brain signal to the rest of your body, your joints, and your muscles to integrate tactile information, you know hot and cold,sensation, pressure, pain, proprioception. A lot of times people might have difficulty with knowing where their arm is in space or knowing where their leg is in space when they're walking and then they can't even put their foot placement or are dropping things all the time on the floor. So, I think a really important thing is that when you have sensory deficits especially with proprioception is really using your vision to compensate for your arm movements or leg movements, so using your eyes to compensate and making sure you're looking at what you're doing to compensate for that. There's also repetition of trying to do those movements and whatever movements you're trying to do like open a container, try doing that over and over again, kind of reintegrate your brain. Also, if you're super sensitive to touch, that could happen too, so you can work on touching various textures. Start with like a cotton ball and rub it against your skin and then go rougher. You know textures and whatever you can tolerate. That's a way to kind of help with that. Also, with people who have difficulty with hot and cold, use another part of the body such as elbow or arm to kind of detect those things. Another thing that can happen is people not being able to identify objects. If you go and l take something out of your pocket, you might not be able to know what that is with your eyes closed. You can you can feel it, you know you can detect what that is, so you can practice working on that by just trying to you know feel around the coins and try to identify what it is and practicing doing those activities will be helpful.