Award
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development 1R01HD121866-01
Developing and validating the Communicating Needs with Care Partners Scale (CONNECT): a person-centered brain injury outcome measure
Recipient
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Award Amount
$756,415.00
Ceiling
$756,415.00
Awarded
June 03, 2026
Identifier
1R01HD121866-01
The project develops and validates the CONNECT scale to measure communication recovery in severe brain injury patients, aiming to improve outcome assessment and prognostic modeling.
Description
This R01 project is a multi-site study aimed at developing and validating the CONNECT scale, which assesses recovery of basic communication, a highly valued, but rarely measured brain injury milestone. The study involves finalizing the content of CONNECT, assessing its validity and reliability, and evaluating its measurement properties using Rasch analysis. The goal is to create a structured interview administered remotely to care partners, ranging from attempts to communicate to accurate expression of needs, to serve as a robust outcome measure for brain injury recovery.