Q: What is Hand-TaPS?

A.  Hand-TaPS  stands for Hand Task Practice Survey. It's a  new,  smartphone-based mini-survey whose purpose is to better understand the experience of using hand movement retraining, "exercise" devices at home. OT's (occupational therapists) call these exercises "task practice."

Hand-TaPS uses a precision survey method called EMA (ecological momentary assessment).  As more and more people move to smartphones,  EMA is poised to become the survey method of choice for understanding how people actually experience using technology to help them do therapy at home.

Q: How does ecological momentary assessment (EMA) improve on traditional surveys?

A.  Traditional surveys ask you a lot of questions, all at once, about a technology you've used at some point in the past. Our minds tend to summarize the experience, blurring the highs and the lows.

EMA works by presenting just a very few, multiple choice questions periodically over the time you are learning and using the new technology.  We think EMA is a good approach to understanding people's day-to-day experience using technology in their home hand exercise programs. 

Trying to register for Hand-TaPS?

To sign up for Hand-TaPS as part of the SaeboFlex/Reach or Saebo Glove evaluation ...
CLICK HERE!

Other Applications of EMA

Project D3 is also using EMA to sample the experience of families of children with CP (cerebral palsy) using the game-based robotic system, PedBotHome, under development in project D2. Read about it here.