Dynamic Movement Intervention (DMI) is a comprehensive intervention used by physical and occupational therapists to treat children with gross motor impairments. DMI is a recognised therapeutic technique used to treat children with motor delay by improving automatic postural responses and promoting progress towards developmental milestones.
By stimulating neuroplasticity, DMI facilitates new neuronal connections and helps develop motor milestones. This allows therapists to provoke specified active motor responses through dynamic exercises, continuously challenging the child to move with greater independence.
Dynamic Movement Intervention specialists’ primary goals when working with pediatric patients include improving gross motor skills, enhancing postural control, and building overall balance. Additional physical and developmental benefits of DMI for children include:
- Gross Motor Skills: Improving gross motor skills of children from birth by developing automatic motor movement and promoting neurological maturity.
- Gradual Progression: Continuously increasing the challenge to encourage the child to respond with greater independence.
- Alignment and Postural Control: All exercises focus on optimal anatomical alignment and stimulate postural control and verticality.
- Range of Motion: Muscle and joint range of motion is achieved by movement through dynamic and functional stretching.
- Balance: Improved balance is a common thread through most DMI exercises.
- Functional Movements: Improving actions and skills that lead to attaining milestones such as rolling, sitting, standing, and walking.
- Somatosensory Development: Strong sensory information provided by the exercises sends afferent messages to the brain to create specialized synapses that fine-tune balance, muscle control, and movement.
- Modifying Tone, Primitive Reflexes, and Abnormal Patterns: Providing normalized movement patterns to children with neurological dysfunction to assist with the integration of disruptive primitive reflexes.
- Global Development: While focusing primarily on gross motor skills, many other developmental skills progress as a byproduct of this intensive intervention.
