Abstract for presentation at 6th World Congress on Brain Injury

Objective: To identify if the Assessment of Motor and Process Skills (AMPS) is able to reflect clinically and statistically significant change in patient’s functional ability level post traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Method: Clinical pilot study conducted with Royal Perth Hospital ethics committee approval. Ten neurosurgery in-patients who met study inclusion criteria were interviewed to determine functional tasks that were meaningful and of appropriate skill challenge. They participated in an AMPS assessment, performing their two selected functional tasks. Three weeks later each participant was reassessed with the AMPS and overall motor and process skill scores compared. Analysis used repeated measure paired t tests using SPSS.
Results: Eight participants have been assessed according to study method. All participants were male, Caucasian with a mean age of 29 (range =18-42), indicating that our sample fit Australian demographics for TBI. The average motor score on initial assessment was –0.3100; the average process score – 0.58. On re-assessment these increased to 1.27 and 0.40 respectively. Consistently positive trends from initial to second assessment are evident; improvements of more than 0.5 logits indicates clinically significant change in functional ability. Data was normally distributed with the mean motor score at baseline of –0.31 and at repeat assessment 1.27. This reflects a 0.004 level of significance. The mean process score at initially was – 0.58 and the repeat score was 0.40. This reflects a 0.005 level of significance. Data collection will continue until the proposed sample size is acquired.
Conclusions: Improvements noted in preliminary motor and process scores indicate AMPS is useful as a sensitive outcome measure of IADL ability with the severely impaired brain injured population over a three week assessment period, backed by statistically and clinically significant data. Our pilot study therefore supports the use of the AMPS with this population in the rehabilitation setting. What has contributed to this improvement in ability would need to be addressed in future research, as this study has not addressed type / duration of interventions and the effect on performance.