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

Abstract

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.