Impacts of home-based physical exercises on the health of people with spinal cord injury: a systematic review

The confinement period caused by the SARS-COV2 pandemic is another barrier to the practice of physical exercise by people with spinal cord injury (SCI). In view of the countless therapies targeted at this public, it is necessary to highlight the benefits of exercises performed at home. Thus, our objective was to determine the main characteristics of physical exercise training modes performed at home and their effects on people with SCI. We searched for intervention studies in five databases (PubMed, ScienceDirect, SPORTDiscus, Scopus and Cochrane CENTRAL) by including the terms and descriptors: “spinal cord injury”, “home-based”, exercise”, “video game”, “home-based physical activity”. The selected studies were described by means of a narrative synthesis. Of 69,843 studies, only 10 met the eligibility criteria, totaling 153 investigated individuals (25 women and 128 men). Regarding the type of injury, 118 participants were paraplegic and 33 tetraplegic. The studies addressed functional electrical stimulation (n = 4), electronic assistive devices (n = 5) and stretching exercises (n = 1). We observed that the focus of the interventions was the morphological, motor neuron, quality of life and functional aspects. The studies showed improvements in muscle strength and morphology, in the ability to perform daily activities, in quality of life and in functional capacities, with no reported adverse situations. Although our review included a low number of randomized studies, we can conclude that several modes of exercise in the home environment promote benefits for people with SCI and can be options for maintaining or developing the health of this population.