American Heart Association, Stroke, 3(45), p. 889-892, 2014
DOI: 10.1161/strokeaha.113.002906
Full text: Download
Background and Purpose— Improving actionable stroke knowledge of a witness or bystander, which in some cases are children, may improve response to an acute stroke event. Methods— We used a quasiexperimental pre-test post-test design to evaluate actionable stroke knowledge of 210 children aged 9 to 10 years in response to a single, 15-minute exposure to a stroke education video game conducted in the school computer laboratory. After immediate post-test, we provided remote password-protected online video game access and encouraged children to play at their leisure from home. An unannounced delayed post-test occurred 7 weeks later. Results— Two hundred ten children completed pretest, 205 completed immediate post-test, whereas 198 completed delayed post-test. One hundred fifty-six (74%) children had Internet access at home, and 41 (26%), mostly girls, played the video game remotely. There was significant improvement in stroke symptom composite scores, calling 911, and all individual stroke knowledge items, including a distractor across the testing sequence ( P <0.05). Children who played the video game remotely demonstrated significant improvement in knowledge of 1 symptom (sudden imbalance) compared with children who did not ( P <0.05), although overall composite scores showed no difference. Conclusions— Stroke education video games may represent novel means for improving and sustaining actionable stroke knowledge of children.