Dyslexia affects 3 to 5% of children and teenagers under the age of 18. It is manifested by difficulties in reading, pronunciation sometimes but also attention. This tablet game, called Mila, allows rehabilitation of these learning disabilities by focusing on music.
Concretely, when he is facing his screen, the child must advance characters in rhythm, he must sometimes repeat sounds, or make gestures according to a melody. It turns out that recognizing and analyzing rhythm in music follows pretty much the same neural pathways as recognizing rhythm in a sentence, says Mila co-founder François Vonthron, who is a polytechnic engineer and himself. same musician. By manipulating sound and visual elements through play, we also stimulate this cerebral network which serves to make reading or language more fluid.
The clinical trial is carried out in collaboration with the child psychiatry service of La Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris, a service directed by Professor David Cohen, and it concerns a total of 160 children aged 7 to 11 years. Recruitment of volunteers is still ongoing.
It is therefore necessary to carry out a clinical trial to medically test this video game. This is a phase 3, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. And so as with pills or vaccines, this means that this is the last stage before the market launch and that half of the participants will test the real game and the other a placebo. A placebo game that looks like the original game, but in which we have erased the rhythmic stimulation mechanisms that help with reading. Neither the medical staff supervising the trial nor the children know whether they are testing the real game or not.
After two months of use at the rate of 25 minutes of play four to five times a week, the children of the two groups will be evaluated via reading tests validated by speech therapists. For ethical reasons, children who have not benefited from the real game during the trial will be entitled to it afterwards. The results should be known at the end of this year, with a possible marketing at the beginning of next year if the results are conclusive.
If all goes well, this video game will be issued on prescription and reimbursed by social security as well. In any case, this is what the creators of Mila, who have been working on this project since 2018, hope. The idea is to be able to deploy the game both to speech therapists and doctors, and to families (on prescription) with the possibility reimbursement by social security or by mutual insurance companies.
This track of therapeutic video games is more and more explored by medical research: to rehabilitate learning disorders, memory, visual disorders or to relieve pain.
The idea is obviously not to replace health professionals but to have additional tools in a context where medical demand is high and where the time to obtain an appointment is sometimes longer.