Hello everybody!
I am helping some colleagues and peers at Boston University with a research grant project. If you are a parent of a child 6-16 years old (with or without disability) and residing in Canada or the United States, you are encouraged to take the PEP survey online at this link and win an iPod Touch. To participate, click here.
The Participation and Environment Project (PEP) is a federally funded project through the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) of the U.S. Department of Education. This project involves collaboration among researchers in the United States (Wendy Coster, Boston University and Gary Bedell, Tufts University) and Canada (Mary Law, McMaster University). Here is an excerpt from the letter sent to me by my former BU professor, Mary Khetani, MA, OTR:
“For the past two years, we have been working closely with parents, researchers, and service providers to develop the Participation and Environment Measure-Children and Youth Version (PEM-CY), an online survey to gather parent input about how their children participate in typical activities in the home, at school, and in the community. Parents are asked to report on the kinds of activities their children participate in, how often and how much they participate, whether or not they desire change and if so what type(s) of change, and what helps and/or hinders their child’s participation in each environment. We designed this survey to gather information to enable policymakers to be more responsive to the participation related needs of families.”
Thank you.
Researchers from the School of Occupational Therapy at Texas Woman’s University Dallas Campus are seeking occupational therapy experts located world wide as part of a Delphi study on assessing pain across cultures. The purpose of the study is to globally pilot the efficiency and effectiveness of electronically distributed Delphi survey methods to identify the type of pain assessments being used by occupational therapists globally and the frequency and context of use of participant identified pain assessments in occupational therapy clinical practice, education, and/or research.
Requirements include: English literacy or access to translation, access to a computer, and internet.
If interested, click here to access letter of consent and survey. Round I will be available February 10, 2010 through March 3, 2010, and Round II available March 24, 2010 through April 14, 2010. We all know pain can be quite disabling and lead you to social security disability, so the researchers would appreciate your participation and contribution of knowledge of pain assessments in an effort to further the field of occupational therapy.
Source: WFOT
Here is an article published on Advance, which talks about some recent research findings on Autism.
Faint magnetic signals from brain activity in children with autism demonstrate they process sound and language differently. Identifying and classifying these brain response patterns may allow researchers to accurately diagnose autism and possibly develop more effective treatments for the developmental disorder.
Timing appears to be crucial. Children with autism respond a fraction of a second slower to vowel tones and sounds than healthy children, revealed study leader Timothy Roberts, PhD, vice chair of radiology research and holder of the Oberkircher Family Endowed Chair in Pediatric Radiology at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
To determine this response time, Roberts used a technology called magnetoencephalography (MEG), which detects magnetic fields in the brain, just as electroencephalography (EEG) detects electrical fields.
Read more »
Hopefully this new technology will help in the early diagnosis and intervention of children with ASD.
