A Study on the Effects of Motor Intervention on the Motor Development of Low Birth Weight Premature Infants

On the basis of the characteristics of infant motor development, sports training, and theories concerning the development of children's movement, experts designs a set of intervention program, including touching and massage,... [ view full abstract ]

On the basis of the characteristics of infant motor development, sports training, and theories concerning the development of children's movement, experts designs a set of intervention program, including touching and massage, gymnastics, sports and active sports training for the early childhood development of infants by 0-3 years old. Subjects of the experimental group receive a 60-minute intensive training three times a week in the hospital. In addition, their parents are given manuals and appropriate training tools for home training. Meanwhile, none particular action development intervention is conducted on the infants of control group.

2-2.4 years after the intervention, the Peabody Motor Development Scale (PDMS-2) is used to evaluate the two groups of children. The result indicates that  It suggests that the adoption of intervention program in premature infant effectively prevents them from a gross or fine motor development deviation. The PDMS-2 scores of the 8 subjects on average in the experimental group are GMQ (92.94 ± 13.75), FMQ (93.68 ± 12.93), and TMQ (91.29 ± 14.51) while those of the control group are GMQ (80.54 ± 12.59), FMQ 79.84 ± 13.90) and TMQ (75.90 ± 17.14). The result from the paired sample t-test manifests that there exists significant difference between the two groups (P <0.05). Those low birth weight premature infants receiving the early motor development intervention program significantly differ from those in the control group after 2 to 2.4 years in terms of the number of the cases with a gross or fine motor development deviation and general exercise level. The result of the paired sample t-test, which results from the comparison between the experimental group and the control group shows that the intervention program is of great help to improve the motor development of low birth weight premature infants.