The Scale for Assessment and Rating of Ataxia Is Reliable and Valid in the Telehealth Setting for Patients With Cerebellar Ataxia.

Objective: Health care has increasingly expanded into a hybrid in-person/telehealth model. Patients with a variety of health conditions, including cerebellar ataxia, have received virtual health evaluations; however, it remains unknown whether some outcome measures that clinicians utilize in the telehealth setting are reliable and valid. The goal of this project is to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Scale for Assessment and Rating of Ataxia (SARA) for patients with cerebellar ataxia in the telehealth setting.

Stroke in the Developing Brain: Neurophysiologic Implications of Stroke Timing, Location, and Comorbid Factors.

Background: Pediatric stroke, which is unique in that it represents a static insult to a developing brain, often leads to long-term neurological disability. Neuroplasticity in infants and children influences neurophysiologic recovery patterns after stroke; therefore outcomes depend on several factors including the timing and location of stroke and the presence of comorbid conditions.

Methods: In this review, we discuss the unique implications of stroke occurring in the fetal, perinatal, and childhood/adolescent time periods.

A novel video game for remote studies of motor adaptation in children.

Here we designed a motor adaptation video game that could be played remotely (at home) through a web browser. This required the child to adapt to a visuomotor rotation between their hand movement and a ball displayed in the game. The task had several novel features, specifically designed to allow the study of the developmental trajectory of adaptation across a wide range of ages.

Customized gaming system engages young children in reaching and balance training.

Purpose: Trunk stability, an important prerequisite for many activities of daily living, can be impaired in children with movement disorders. Current treatment options can be costly and fail to fully engage young participants. We developed an affordable, smart screen-based intervention and tested if it engages young children in physical therapy goal driven exercises.

Between Limb Muscle Co-activation Patterns in the Paretic Arm During Non-paretic Arm Tasks in Hemiparetic Cerebral Palsy.

Tasks of daily life require the independent use of the arms and hands. Individuals with hemiparetic cerebral palsy (HCP) often experience difficulty with fine motor tasks demonstrating mirrored movements between the arms. In this study, bilateral muscle activations were quantified during single arm isometric maximum efforts and submaximal reaching tasks.

Stakeholder Perspectives on Engaging With Cerebral Palsy Research Studies After Onset of COVID-19 in the United States.

Objective: To investigate the effect of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on perspectives toward participation in cerebral palsy (CP) research.

Design: An online survey with questions relating to the comfort levels of research participation was filled out by people who had CP or had a child with CP.

Setting: The online survey was administered through Research Electronic Data Capture platform.

The Upper Extremity Flexion Synergy Is Minimally Expressed in Young Individuals With Unilateral Cerebral Palsy Following an Early Brain Injury.

Hemiparetic stroke in adulthood often results in the grouped movement pattern of the upper extremity flexion synergy thought to arise from an increased reliance on cortico-reticulospinal pathways due to a loss of lateral corticospinal projections. It is well established that the flexion synergy induces reaching constraints in individuals with adult-onset hemiplegia. The expression of the flexion synergy in individuals with brain injuries onset earlier in the lifespan is currently unknown.

Development of a Method to Quantify Abnormal Kinetic and Kinematic Coupling Patterns during Functional Movements in the Paretic Arm and Hand of Individuals with Pediatric Hemiplegia.

A main focus of clinical interventions for adults after a stroke and children with hemiplegia is upper limb motor impairments. Robotic and motion capture technologies have been used to quantify the presence of abnormal joint coupling patterns in the arm and hand in adults who have had a stroke. Similar impairments have been observed clinically in children with hemiplegia, however, quantitative measurement tools tailored for this population are lacking.

Estimating Voluntary Activation Of The Elbow And Wrist Muscles In Chronic Hemiparetic Stroke Using Twitch Interpolation Methodology.

One of the cardinal motor deficits that occurs after stroke is paresis, a decrease in the voluntary activation of muscles. Paresis leads to a decrease in voluntary joint strength, impacting stroke survivors' ability to perform activities of daily living (ADLs). Quantifying this decrease in voluntary activation is important when designing rehabilitation interventions to address movement impairments and restore the ability to perform ADLs.

Low-cost, high-throughput, automated counting of bacterial colonies.

Research involving bacterial pathogens often requires enumeration of bacteria colonies. Here, we present a low-cost, high-throughput colony counting system consisting of colony counting software and a consumer-grade digital camera or document scanner. We demonstrate that this software, called "NICE" (NIST's Integrated Colony Enumerator), can count bacterial colonies as part of a high-throughput multiplexed opsonophagocytic killing assay used to characterize pneumococcal vaccine efficacy.