Mild to moderate traumatic brain injuries can have lasting consequences for cognition. However, the ways in which cognition is affected in any given individual is hard to predict. In part, this is because people differ in the areas of the brain that are affected and the capacities they have to adapt and recover. This variability is hard to study because people also differ substantially in their cognitive strengths even before they have a brain injury.
The cognitive work-stream of the mTBI Predict research program will use a state-of-the-art online assessment app that precisely measures different aspects of a person's cognitive faculties, such as memory, attention, planning and self-restraint, to better understand the nature of cognitive problems after traumatic brain injury. The app can be deployed on practically any tablet or smart phone device in order that patients can be assessed repeatedly at home with hardware they already own. It will be used to assess patients repeatedly throughout the research programme, providing a detailed profile of each individual's cognitive abilities and how they change across time. These cognitive profiles will be analysed in relation to clinical records, brain images, sleep diaries and other types of data in order to better understand why people are affected differently by traumatic brain injuries and why some people recover better than others.
Cognitron App
The Cognitron app is a smartphone app which is used to help collect high-fidelity, psychological and physiological data from our participants, without the need for repeat visits. This allows us to go beyond the kinds of measures that we might see in a clinical environment, and measure changes in both state and trait over time, during recovery from TBI. Cognitron allows us to repeatedly test measures of cognitive performance using brief well validated neurocognitive paradigms, as well as extensive questionnaire and diary data that allows us to psychological state such as mood as well as measuring physiological outcome measures such as sleep. Our participants will use the app in combination with a ‘smart watch’ which will allow us to generate a very well validated measurement of their sleep physiology as well as monitoring various other cardiovascular measures across time.
Lead Researchers