Boise, Idaho
Kim is an occupational therapist in an outpatient neurorehabilitation facility in Idaho. One of the services she provides is giving clinical assessments of cognitive ability as it relates to driving safety, most often to older adults. To do so, she administers a set of tests—ones that assess processing speed, reaction time, and so on—to her patients.
Some of her patients score poorly on the clinical assessments. That can be a major blow, because many of them don’t want give up their car keys. After all, in the car culture of the United States, driving is often key to independence. If you can’t go where you need to go when you need to be there—without relying on others—you give up some of your freedom.
When one of her patients scores low on the assessments, Kim does her best to help them improve at the cognitive skills, with the goal that they can continue to drive safely. One of her tools for doing that is BrainHQ.
“BrainHQ is great because it gives my patients something useful to do at home, which we can then follow up on when we meet,” Kim says. “It gives an objective score that I can translate into a likeliness to show improvements on standardized tests, so I know when they’ll be ready to retake them.”
“Plus,” she continues, “the exercises are always at the right level for my patients. They feel challenged but not frustrated.”
Kim has had a lot of success using BrainHQ in her practice. In one case, a patient of Kim’s in his 60s scored in the 1st percentile on one assessment…meaning that 99% of people scored higher than he did. On another, he scored at the 14th percentile—another low score. Kim saw him for ten weeks, assigned him BrainHQ, and four months later he was at the 30th percentile and 79th percentile, respectively. “He went from severely below average to average,” says Kim. “In a few months, he’s going to take the road test again!”
We are grateful to Kim for helping her patients drive safely and confidently, and couldn’t be happier that BrainHQ is part of the solution.