UK SBS CBSU New Life project

Specific requirements for this project: This is a collaborative project involving scientists from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the Medical Research Council, and is funded by the NewLife Foundation for Disabled Children. We are seeking an industry partner with expertise and proven experience in the programming and remote delivery of cognitive assessments.

These are our specific requirements: Cognitive assessment A central aim of this project is to generate 3-4 new cognitive assessments that provide valid and reliable measures of different aspects of attentional and cognitive control (e.g. go/no-go tasks, visual oddball detection, visual search). Expertise in these psychological processes and how they can be taxed using cognitive assessments is vital in any industry partner.

These assessment need to be highly flexible, providing robust measures of performance even for young children (aged 4) with low IQ, whilst still being able to tax older children. As such we envisage that there will be some adaptable element to these tasks, with their difficulty being titrated to be sensitive across the age and ability range.

These tasks need to be fun and engaging, and must be feasible even for some children that may not understand verbal instruction. From the child’s perspective these tasks need to have an enjoyable game-like quality, whilst at the same time providing specific and reliable measures of cognitive ability.

The iPads will need to be configured such that they can only be used for the cognitive assessments, because they will be left with families for an extended period, during which time they will be encouraged to play the games regularly. So experience with the specific practical and programming constraints involved in using iPads in this way would be highly desirable.

Online data collection The participants in this study will be located throughout the UK, and it is therefore essential that the tasks developed work in a remote fashion. We therefore require that a platform for online delivery is also developed in parallel to the actual tasks.

The programming will need to be done in html5, such that it is compatible with other similar applications that we are currently using at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. This proposed platform needs to be tested and highly reliable – families will not be able resolve problems remotely. iii) Secure data storage and remote synchronisation The data collected will need to be secured on the tablet and remotely uploaded to a central server for analysis. The proposed system will need to have considered carefully the strict requirements surrounding data storage and privacy, as implemented by both the MRC and NHS.