Premature newborns admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit are exposed to factors that compromise neurobehavioral organization. In addition to the disorganization of all organic subsystems due to immaturity and pathophysiological conditions, environmental risks are also present, ranging from noise and excessive light to painful invasive procedures and a lack of physical and emotional contact, directly impacting neuropsychomotor development.

To investigate the effects of tactile-kinesthetic stimulation on the neuropsychomotor development of premature newborns admitted to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

A systematic review based on the PRISMA method, using the PICO strategy, was carried out in the bibliographic databases: MEDLINE/PubMed, The Cochrane Library, Scopus, VHL, and Web of Science. This was based on the descriptors contained in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and Health Sciences Descriptors (DeCS), together with their subtitles organized with the Boolean operators OR and AND. The extracted data were decoded by RAYYAN, where the studies were screened. The risk of bias analysis was carried out using ROB2, evaluating the methodological quality of the included studies.

In this study, six randomized clinical trials were included after blind analysis by two reviewers, with a review by a third reviewer excluding texts that were unavailable in full. The period of publication of the research was from 2009 to 2023, without continental restrictions, which applied tactile and/or kinesthetic intervention to premature infants in the neonatal ICU. The main effects were: weight gain and growth; improvement of motor performance; organized modulation of motor activity; facial relaxation; increased bone mineralization; tibial sound growth; and anthropometric measurements; improvement of deep sleep and control of neonatal pain.

Tactile-kinesthetic stimulation brings positive results for pain control and modulation of motor skills; however, it requires studies with aligned therapeutic proposals to delimit the real beneficial effects, with the application of pain assessment scales, behavioral state, and sleep-wake quality.

Sensorimotor stimulation optimizes the integral neuropsychomotor development of newborns, especially premature ones. It is a low-cost, non-pharmacological intervention that integrates a multidisciplinary team and parental care, with defined protocols and practical application from the intensive care unit being essential.