Jill Heathcock
Ohio State University, OH·Medicine & Clinical Research
Reaching for and grabbing objects helps infants and toddlers learn, move and engage with the world around them. For children with hemiparetic cerebral palsy, a movement disorder that weakens one side of the body, these skills develop differently.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
Neuroscience
- Topics
cerebral palsy
hemiparesis
perinatal arterial ischemic stroke
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Build four standardized Behavioral Assessment Method (BAM) Indices of spontaneous reaching and grasping. The indices come from coded videos of 80 typically developing infants and toddlers and 240 children with stroke-related hemiparetic cerebral palsy, analyzed with multiple statistical models.
- Track how the BAM Indices change over time using 1,040 longitudinal videos, including videos from StrokeNet's Phase III randomized trial of constraint-induced movement therapy, which restricts the stronger arm to train the weaker one.
- Establish how reliable and valid the BAM Indices are by comparing them with clinical measures such as the Bayley Scales, Gross Motor Function Measure-66 and Assisting Hand Assessment, and with parent-reported measures such as the Infant Motor Activity Log.
More about the research
Clinicians lack a standard, objective way to measure how far a child's arm and hand use differs from typical development, or how much it improves with treatment. This project focuses on ages 8 to 36 months. During this period, arm and hand skills, mobility, thinking and language grow quickly, and treatments such as constraint-induced movement therapy can begin. That therapy restricts the stronger arm to encourage use of the weaker one.
Why it matters
Many children have infant stroke and hemiparetic cerebral palsy. For them, a reliable, sensitive video-based measure of reaching and grasping could help clinicians and researchers see how much a child's hand use differs from typical and track gains from therapies such as constraint-induced movement therapy. Sharing and coding video data could also make pediatric rehabilitation research cheaper and easier to reproduce.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sudha Srinivasan
University of Connecticut, CT·Medicine & Clinical Research
Assess whether a home program using modified joystick-operated ride-on toys is feasible, enjoyable, and acceptable for children aged 3–8 with hemiplegia and their caregivers, using child and caregiver questionnaires.
Frank Symons
University of Minnesota, MN·Medicine & Clinical Research
Compare sensory function in children and adolescents with cerebral palsy with and without chronic pain, using a modified quantitative sensory testing (QST) protocol that measures both large- and small-fiber nerve function.
Devin L Brown
University of Michigan, MI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine which obstructive sleep apnea endotypes, such as airway collapsibility, loop gain and arousal threshold, drive sleep apnea after stroke, and how they differ by ethnicity and from stroke-free participants, using polysomnography in the BASIC study.
The school
Ohio State University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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