Modified Berg Balance Scale: making assessment appropriate for people with aphasia

Modifying assessments for people with aphasia has the potential to increase the validity of healthcare assessments across professional domains. This pilot study addressed the challenges of giving people with aphasia the power to fully participate in the assessment process. The study aimed to investigate the feasibility of using an aphasia-modified version of the Berg Balance Scale (BBS), a physical therapy assessment tool to quantify dynamic sitting and standing balance.

The study compared how people with aphasia performed on the original BBS to an aphasia-modified version (MBBS), created for this study. We examined the relationship between auditory comprehension scores and balance performance of 15 participants with chronic aphasia and three control participants. We tested the hypothesis that individuals with aphasia would perform higher on the MBBS rather than the BBS, thus more closely approaching a score reflective of their true physical abilities.

Overall people with aphasia performed significantly better on the MBBS than the BBS, indicating that at least some portion of their performance difficulty was likely due to poor auditory comprehension of test instructions rather than true balance difficulty.

Implications of this study suggest that modifying assessments, such as the BBS, by reducing linguistic complexity and adding visual and written cues along with modeling and repetition has the potential to increase the validity of healthcare assessments for individuals with aphasia.