The University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation (PM&R) hosted the Kessler Foundation for a one-day on-site training at the beginning of the year. The Kessler Foundation will serve as the lead site of a new collaborative research project within the Spinal Cord Injury Model System (SCIMS).

The new project: Identifying How Environmental Factors Affect Community Living after SCI Using Geographically Explicitly Ecological Momentary Assessment (GEMA) uses technology to understand participants’ mobility and their access or barriers to community involvement. SCIMS participants enrolled in the GEMA study will receive a Garmin GPS device to be worn at three different time points over a nine-month period. At each time point, participants will wear the device for seven days and answer 10-15 questions on their cell phone or tablet each day during a 20-minute period. Participants will also meet virtually with UAB SCIMS project co-director, Jereme Wilroy, Ph.D., after each seven day period to answer additional questions about their community accessibility. 

Lori Theriot, CRC III, attended the one-day training and will be coordinating the GEMA study at UAB. Mrs. Theriot is enthusiastic about this project “because participants get to provide their input, and they get to share what is accessible and not accessible in their environments—they are giving feedback about the world around them.” During the Kessler Foundation’s visit, their staff provided instruction on how to enroll participants, the study inclusion/exclusion criteria, and how to use the Garmin device.

UAB is one of four research institutions taking part in this multi-site collaboration. In addition to UAB, the Kessler Foundation (West Orange, NJ), Craig Hospital (Englewood, CO), and Baylor Scott and White Research Institute (Dallas, TX) will enroll participants for the GEMA study. According to Yuying Chen, M.D., Ph.D., (professor and vice chair of Research, UAB PM&R Department) the project sites were chosen in part because they are geographically diverse, in an effort to collect more robust data. “This project is exciting to me because we are learning how to apply technology to research and taking advantage of wearable devices in a way that allows us to get real-time data from participants,” Dr. Chen added.

Enrollment for the GEMA study began in early May and the goal for the project is to enroll 20 participants from each research site within a year.