The Impact of the COVID-19 Public Health Crisis on Communication and Quality of Life: Insights From a Community of Stroke and Brain Trauma Survivors.

Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic has led to stay-at-home orders and social distancing guidelines that have the potential to greatly impact individuals' behavior and social engagement. Adults recovering from stroke or other brain trauma, who often have communication difficulties and other long-term challenges, are a population already at risk of isolation and lower quality of life. We investigated the impact of public health guidelines and related behavioral changes on self-perceptions of communication abilities and psychosocial factors in this population.

The SCIRehab project: treatment time spent in SCI rehabilitation. Speech-language pathology treatment time during inpatient spinal cord injury rehabilitation: the SCIRehab project.

Background/objective: Following spinal cord injury (SCI), speech-language pathologists (SLPs) perform assessments and provide treatment for swallowing, motor speech, voice, and cognitive-communication disorders that result from the SCI and/or co-occurring brain injuries. This paper describes the nature and distribution of speech-language pathology (SLP) activities delivered during inpatient SCI rehabilitation and discusses predictors (patient and injury characteristics) of the amount of time spent in specific SLP treatment activities.

Methods: Six rehabilitation centers enrolled 600 patients with traumatic SCI for an observational study of acute inpatient rehabilitation treatment (SCIRehab).

SCIRehab Project series: the speech language pathology taxonomy.

Introduction: Outcomes research for speech language pathology (SLP) interventions for acute traumatic spinal cord injury (SSC) rehabilitation in the US is difficult because of the lack of a treatment classification system (taxonomy).

Objective: To describe a taxonomy developed by speech language pathologists (SLPs) to examine the effects of SLP interventions on SCI rehabilitation outcomes.

Methods: The SCIRehab study uses practice-based evidence, a rigorous observational methodology that examines treatment processes without specifying or requiring specific therapeutic interventions.

The effect of videoconference-based telerehabilitation on story retelling performance by brain-injured subjects and its implications for remote speech-language therapy.

This paper presents results from a study conducted at the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Telerehabilitation at the National Rehabilitation Hospital. The study was designed to measure performance by brain-injured subjects, with medical diagnoses of stroke or traumatic brain injury, on a standardized Speech-Language Pathology evaluation conducted in both face-to-face and videoconference-based telerehabilitation settings. The Story Retelling Procedure (SRP), which measures connected language production and comprehension of spoken narratives, was administered to each subject in both settings.