CHILD-BRIGHT Mega Team:
Treatments to Improve Emotional and Behavioural Self-Regulation
A BRIGHT Supports project
WE’RE WORKING TO IMPROVE MEMORY AND EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONING SKILLS IN CHILDREN WITH BRAIN-BASED DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES THROUGH COGNITIVE-BASED VIDEO GAME TRAINING.
Principal Investigator: Jennifer Crosbie (SickKids)
Looking back:
our work in Phase 1
Summer student Vaishnavi Bhamidi and Mega Team Clinical Research Project Coordinator Taha Arshad analyze a participant’s assessment data sheet.
Mega Team is a convenient and fun at-home video game created to help children and youth with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and congenital heart disease (CHD) improve their working memory and behavioural control.
This year, we recruited 66 new study participants to test the video game, for a total of 228 participants. This was in no small part thanks to new recruitment strategies that compensated for pandemic-related challenges, including the use of parent Facebook groups and the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital connect2research database, a large database of eligible candidates at that institution. Once we complete our recruitment phase, we will move ahead with data analysis, with the goal of completing our clinical trial by fall 2022.
“We worked really hard to incorporate creative recruitment strategies and it’s been paying off!” – Taha Arshad, Mega Team Clinical Research Project Coordinator
In the past year, we successfully onboarded several new co-op students, who were responsible for a variety of tasks, including running our many participant visits and working extensively with data management.
“Flexible scheduling has really helped accommodate and support a wider breadth of families so they could participate in our study.” – Navi Dhaliwal,
Clinical Research Project Assistant
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An eye to the future: what Phase 2 has in store for us
Navi Dhaliwal, Clinical Research Project Assistant
Taha Arshad, Mega Team’s Clinical Research Project Coordinator
As we complete the clinical trial and Phase 1 results become available, we will be able to focus on knowledge mobilization, dissemination, and implementation (taking significant findings and moving them into wider use in routine practice).
Youth and patient-partner involvement will be key as we shift into this next stage. We will work closely with our patient-partners to ensure our knowledge mobilization plan is accessible to children and youth with ADHD, ASD, and CHD and their families, since they will be the video game training’s end users.
Phase 2 represents an exciting opportunity for our team, as we believe the potential benefits of our research to be significant. In the six years since Mega Team’s inception, the use of technology in clinical practice has increased. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a greater appreciation and acceptance of, and desire for, virtual assessment and intervention tools. Many supports were lost for individuals with brain-based developmental disabilities. Meanwhile, stress related to the pandemic increased mental health concerns for all children and youth, but particularly for those with pre-existing conditions such as ADHD and ASD. As such, the validation of a novel virtual tool such as ours aimed at improving attention and self-regulation is of even greater importance now.
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