We had just launched a new cognitive training trial for Veterans and Service members with a history of traumatic brain injury when the COVID-19 pandemic began. With all in-person research prohibited at our facility, we elected to redesign the study for all remote procedures. Transitioning to virtual procedures was straightforward for our intervention sessions and some of our assessments, but we were not able to include all of the neuropsychological measures we had originally proposed. We considered different ways to measure all of the targeted cognitive domains, and found that the NeuroUX platform suited our study’s needs particularly well. With the mobile cognitive testing NeuroUX offers, we are able to measure neuropsychological functioning in multiple domains 24 times during our 12-week trial, in contrast to what would have been three times in the original study design. Having so many more time points will allow us to examine intervention-associated change over time with more power and will permit finer-grained analyses of time to response and inter-individual variability over time.
By administering cognitive tests in each participant’s environment rather than in the lab, we hope to capture a more accurate picture of cognitive functioning in the real world. We have found that the participants have been able to complete the NeuroUX tests without difficulty. The NeuroUX team quickly programmed the testing platform individualized for our study, so we were ready to launch quickly, and even helped us with the language to submit to our IRB. Additionally, they have been helpful and responsive in accommodating participant-requested scheduling changes in the timing of the test sessions. We have been very satisfied with the amount of data we are now able to acquire, the ease of use for participants and researchers alike, and the level of customer service NeuroUX provides. We have already recommended NeuroUX for other studies, and will continue to use the platform in future cognitive training studies.
