Research

Special Research Projects

ECHO (Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes)

Sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the ECHO Program represents a network of medical specialists, scientists, and scholars dedicated to enhancing the health of children for generations to come. The goal of the nationwide consortium is to understand the effects of a broad range of early environmental influences on child health and development. ECHO is committed to both learning what factors affect child health and to finding ways to enhance it, with aims to:

• Enhance the health of children and adolescents through research that may help inform healthcare practices, programs, and policies.
• Create a culture that helps teams of child health researchers work together to achieve the best results.

Read more about ECHO

Infant and Toddler (Baby) Toolbox

Funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Infant and Toddler (Baby) Toolbox (NBT) is a five-year contract to create an iPad-based measurement tool for administering, scoring, and interpreting infant and toddler assessments of cognition, social functioning, language (receptive and expressive), early mathematics/numeracy, self-regulation, and executive function in children between 1- and 42-months of age. As a natural extension to the NIH Toolbox®, assessments will include direct child assessment and observations supplemented as needed by reporting from parents or legal guardians.

Read more about the Baby Toolbox

ARMADA (Advancing Reliable Measurement in Alzheimer’s Disease and cognitive Aging)

Aging-associated cognitive decline, whether mild or severe, can profoundly affect the independence, well-being, and quality of life of those aged 65 and older. Development of effective interventions and treatments for this requires standard, psychometrically sound, easy-to-use measures that are sensitive to early indicators of cognitive decline and capture non-cognitive factors associated with or predictive of cognitive changes. Funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), the ARMADA project is designed to meet this need by validating and expanding measures from the four NIH Toolbox® (NIHTB) domains – Cognition, Emotion, Sensory, and Motor – in individuals with mild cognitive impairment, early Alzheimer’s disease, and in healthy individuals over age 85. To ensure that the NIHTB will be a valuable resource for cognitive aging research, ARMADA aims to:

Read more about the ARMADA

MyCog (Rapid Detection of Cognitive Impairment in Everyday Clinical Settings)

Cognitive impairment (CI) is increasing in the US as the elderly population increases, and therefore early detection of CI is critical for ensuring its appropriate management. Funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), MyCog is a research project designed to create a brief screening battery (the MyCog iPad App) to identify patients with increased risk for CI and/or dementia for further evaluation. This brief, new technology can be easily implemented in everyday clinical settings with diverse populations.

Read more about the MyCog

Toolbox Detect

Designed to test the effectiveness of the MyCog iPad app as a new standard of care, the Toolbox Detect project was created as clinical trial intended to refine and embed the MyCog paradigm into routine clinical care at 40 clinics spread across Northwestern Medicine – and Access – a federally-qualified health center (FQHC) organization with 35 health centers, located throughout Chicago, Cook and DuPage counties.

Research Using the Mobile Toolbox

The Mobile Toolbox has been used in a wide variety of research across the lifespan.

Browse Publications using Mobile Toolbox