March is Brain Injury Awareness Month. An annual campaign led by the Brain Injury Awareness Association of America (BIAA) and the United States Brain Injury Alliance, Brain Injury Awareness Month “provides a platform for educating the general public about the incidence of brain injury and the needs of people with brain injuries and their families.”

In keeping with the Brain Injury Awareness theme, there is an innovative new project under way to develop a web-based training and information resource for parents of children and youth with brain injuries. The project is called Traumatic Brain Injury Positive Strategies (TIPS), and is a collaboration between Eugene-based Assistech Systems,* the University of Oregon’s Center on Brain Injury Research and Training (CBIRT), and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Tom Keating, PhD of Assistech Systems and Ann Glang of CBIRT are the project’s directors in collaboration with Shari Wade, PhD Director of Research, Division of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Cincinnati Children’s.
The development of TIPS is being driven by $1.5 million dollars in Phase II grant funding from the Small Business Innovation Research Program of the National Institutes of Health. When completed, it will be an engaging educational resource to help families improve their knowledge and skills to more effectively handle the cognitive, behavioral, and social challenges that follow pediatric TBI.

TIPS is being designed and evaluated with input from clinicians and parents at three national centers specializing in the treatment of children with brain injury: Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, Gillette Children’s Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.

The project is expected to be completed by December 2018.

For more information on TIPS, including possible opportunities for design input and beta testing please contact Ann Glang (glanga@cbirt.org) or Tom Keating (tkeating@cognitopia.com).

The development of TIPS is supported in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R44HD059255. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

* Assistech Systems, LLC is a small business focused on research and development on technology to support employment, education, and community living for youth and adults with cognitive disabilities. Assistech works closely with Cognitopia on the commercial development and distribution of its grant-funded work.

Julie Henning

Julie Henning has been with Cognitopia since 2015. In that time, she has been involved in customer support, training, marketing, documentation, social media, and data collection. Some of her favorite projects have been mentoring our videographer intern, Nate, and weekly classroom testing and curriculum development for the many students in the 4J Connections Transition program. She works closely with Eugene-based SLLEA (Smart Living, Learning & Earning with Autism) to integrate Cognitopia’s self-management tools into the organization and structure design input and support platform implementation. Professionally, Julie has over twenty years’ experience working in engineering, technology, software development, and journalism; a path made possible with two degrees in Technical Communication: a BS from the Milwaukee School of Engineering and a MS from Colorado State University. A single mom of three high schoolers (grades 9, 10, and 11), Julie has introduced Cognitopia to terms such as “sick” and “yeet,” while overseeing the office coffee consumption. In her free time, she enjoys playing recreational soccer, improv comedy, and traveling.