Successful mastery with a cognitive orthotic in people with traumatic brain injury

A multifunction cognitive orthotic (CO), designed for individuals with significant deficits from traumatic brain injury, enables rapid unassisted reliable performance of a targeted task and facilitates transfer of training across subsequent activity tasks for most participants. Consistency in design ensures consistent cues and organization as well as unchanging procedural format as content and tasks vary. Of the 41 participants provided a clinical assessment trial with a CO, 36 (88%) demonstrated rapid achievement of success on the initial task. Thereafter, transfer of training was achieved across subsequent targeted activity tasks by changing only the content, in the context of stable CO design. Many individuals with brain injury can be self-sufficient in performing, unassisted, the essential steps of targeted activities when provided a properly designed compensatory assistive device.