RESNA Annual Conference - 2012

TRANSFER ASSESSMENT INSTRUMENT RELIABILITY IN PERSON AND VIA VIDEO

Claire Hoelmer1,2, Chung-Ying Tsai1,2, and Alicia Koontz1,2

1Human Engineering Research Laboratories, Department of Veterans Affairs, Pittsburgh, PA
2Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA

Wheelchair users risk developing secondary impairments from the loading that transfers impart on their upper extremities. The Transfer Assessment Instrument (TAI) was developed for therapists to evaluate transfer skills. This study analyzed the reliability of the TAI (version 2.0) for in-person rater and video rater evaluation methods. TAI scores were gathered from 2 sessions and 4 raters. One rater assessed randomly selected subjects from a video. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) for intra- and inter-rater reliability were calculated for in-person and video raters, and the methods were compared using Spearman's rank correlation. The inter-rater ICCS for total TAI score were 0.852 and 0.843 for sessions 1 and 2. Intra-rater ICC was 0.843(0.049) for in-person raters and 0.733 for the video rater. The relationship between methods was moderate (rho = 0.48). Overall, TAI 2.0 proved to be a highly reliable tool for in-person evaluation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study was funded by the National Science Foundation VA Center Grant # B6789C, and undergraduate participation was funded by ASPIRE Grant # 0849878. The author would like to acknowledge the University of Pittsburgh and the Human Engineering Laboratories for offering research opportunities.