In efforts to assist people who have had a concussion (mild traumatic brain injury), the Parkwood Pacing and Planning™ app has been developed and tested and will be released to the public. The app uses a point system where users have a daily point maximum assigned based on symptom severity with daily activities (recorded by the users). Users can then schedule their daily activities based on their allowed points. The goal is to help users with symptom self-management by facilitating activity planning and pacing.
Patients and clinicians have provided positive feedback on the initial version of the app. Using this as a foundation, the investigators envision enhancing the app to provide a more personalized user experience and to enable further discovery and innovations in the recovery from concussion. This will be accomplished through data analytics and machine-learning techniques, informed by the results of a large-scale research trial. This strategy will be used to customize the point system to facilitate the user with pacing and planning.
Experienced a mild traumatic brain injury/concussion
Disclosure of mechanism of injury and whether they were diagnosed with a mild traumatic brain injury/concussion by a registered health care practitioner
18 yeas of age or older
Access to a smartphone or tablet
Did not experience a mild traumatic brain injury/concussion
Unwilling to disclose mechanism of injury and whether they were diagnosed with a mild traumatic brain injury/concussion
Under 18 years of age
No access to a smartphone or tablet
Single group
Pacing and Planning App
DeviceParticipants will download and use the Pacing and Planning app through mybrainpacer.ca. The app will be used to track and monitor their daily tasks and symptoms at any time, for as long as they would like to use the app. While using the app, participants will also fill out short assessments, including the Rivermead Post-Concussion Questionnaire once a month (to monitor symptoms) and an overall symptom question once a week (to rate how they feeling in general from a lot better to a lot worse).
Symptom changes
These are assessed using the Rivermead Post Concussion Questionnaire (RPQ). The RPQ evaluates the severity of 16 common post-concussion symptoms over the past 24 hours (e.g. headache, sleep disturbance, and noise sensitivity). It is a 5-point scale from 0-4, where 0 indicates no symptoms (better outcome), and 4 indicates the symptom is a severe problem (worse outcome). The total from each symptom can be summed for a total score out of 64, where 64 represents experiencing all symptoms, and they are all a severe problem (worse outcome). This will contribute to understanding the effectiveness of the app.
Changes in general well-being
This will be assessed using the responses to one bi-weekly question. The bi-weekly question asks how users are feeling, and they can choose to answer with much worse, worse, the same, better, or much better. This will contribute to understanding the effectiveness of the app.
Change in daily activities and symptoms
This will be measured through reported activities and symptoms. Participants will be able to input the activities (e.g. reading), the time spent doing that activity (e.g. 20 minutes) and their points and difficulty associated with the activity (maximum 10, where 0 is no difficulty and not experiencing symptoms and 10 is extremely difficult and experiencing symptoms). Accordingly, this data will be used to determine recovery patterns and increase personalization of the app.
Click on the lead sponsor to view all of their trials.
London Health Sciences Centre Research Institute OR Lawson Research Institute of St. Joseph's
Lead sponsor
St. Joseph's Health Care (SJHC) Foundation
Collaborator
Cowan Foundation
Collaborator
