Let the Research Begin!

So the last bullet point in my doesn't-do-the-last-year-of-my-life-justice blog entry talked about the research that I will be doing at Push to Walk. At least as soon as I have the time to begin data collection!  Here is a link to a  press release we did about it.

In a nutshell, for a long time we have needed a better system than what we have been using to assess the strength and progress of our clients.  However, as a small non-profit, we don't have the money for expensive equipment or access to facilities that have them.  So what do we do?  Buy a relatively non-expensive piece of equipment called a muscle testing dynamometer and invent our own way to use it to evaluate our clients.

But how do we know that the system we come up with is any good?  By testing it out.  We will have multiple trainers evaluate multiple clients, and compare the results each trainer got to make sure that no matter who evaluates a client's strength, the same results are obtained.  Using statistics (yay, fun!) we can establish whether or not the new evaluation system is reliable.  That is to say, we will see if the new evaluation system accurately and consistently measures the change (or lack thereof) in strength of our clients at various joints in the body.



It was important to get our study approved by an Institutional Review Board, or IRB.  Why?  The main reason is because doing research on human subjects and attempting to get it published without IRB approval is illegal!  IRBs exist to protect any human research subjects.  Before we could embark on our research, we had to write up a proposal outlining our research, what it entailed, how we would ensure the safety of our subjects, and many other details.  The IRB at William Paterson University agreed to oversee our research, and they approved it!

So in a few weeks, when we have enough trainer staff to test out new system on clients, we'll begin our research on the reliability of the NIMS test.  I have a ton of other research ideas I want to discuss, but in the interest of keeping my blogs short and readable, I'll save those for another entry.