About

Welcome to the PANDAbox Community Hub! PANDAbox, or Parent Assisted Neurodevelopmental Assessment, was developed on 20XX by PI Bridgette Kelleher to address a limited repertoire of clinical outcome measures suitable for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Standardized assessment tools such as IQ tests are not designed to capture variability in children with low scores, and often fail to detect small changes in skill over brief periods of time, including treatment trials. In lieu of these tools, non-standardized laboratory techniques that capture 'spectral' signals - such as psychological assays - are recognized as more sensitive to acute changes in patient responses over time. However, these tests require specialized equipment and personnel to administer and are not easily deployed via telehealth. In the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, travel and face-to-face contact are restricted, thus limiting the scope and representativeness of IDD trials.

To that end, the PANDAbox has been deployed in recent years as a scalable, accessible protocol for collecting laboratory-grade data remotely in IDD populations. PANDAbox is easy for caregivers to administer, provides high-quality data from participants with IDD, and conserves costs (Kelleher et al., 2020). Assessments include the following steps.

  1. Participants are mailed a testing kit that contains all necessary materials (toys, computers, prompts).
  2. Examiner calls family at set time and coaches participants through a 30-60 min sequence of behavioral activities, including assays of visual attention, parent-child interactions, temperament, play and motor skills, and social communication. The entire exchange is recorded via web cam, and data are processed following kit return.

The purpose of this Community Hub is to provide a free, open science, virtual PANDAbox training hub that contains all materials necessary for interested research groups to independently learn and administer the PANDAbox. In lieu of payment for site use, users are required to participate in our peer-to-peer reliability network, aiding in maintaining consistency of protocol delivery across all user sites. Your Hub Dashboard provides a personalized look at your training progress, current projects, and reliability network participation. The training center contains all training modules and quizzes needed to complete your PANDA certification. The discussion center includes a section where you can post your questions and troubleshoot with other PANDAbox users. The task library provides all current Kelleher Lab protocols, as well as a location for uploading your own, modified protocols so that others may easily replicate your methods. In Active Studies, you may perform a GUID search to determine if any of your consenting participants have also participated in another group's study.