Tolbert Center faculty and students conduct research related to people with or at risk for developmental disabilities and their families. Projects that currently are funded include:

Program Evaluation of the SoonerStart Early Intervention Program
Coordinator: Martha Ferretti, PT, MPH. This project is funded by a contract with the Oklahoma Commission on Children and Youth. Two major components are the Child Longitudinal Progress Study (CLPS), which is examining child outcomes and services, and an ongoing study of parents' experiences in SoonerStart.

School Outcomes Measure
Principal Investigator: Sandra Arnold, PT, PhD. Development of a minimal data set to measure outcomes of children who receive school-based occupational therapy and physical therapy. Visit the SOM Research website for more information.

Self-initiated prone progression in infants with disabilities and at risk for cerebral palsy
Principal Investigator: Thubi H.A. Kolobe, PT, PhD
The purpose of this research is to promote early mobility and exploration in infants with disabilities through a low-cost innovative technologically advanced assistive device, the self-initiated prone progression crawler (SIPPC). The research targets prone progression, the earliest mobility skill that infants use to explore their environments during the first year of life; is integrated with other systems essential for functional independence and academic readiness; has shown very little responsiveness to traditional interventions; and is compromised in children with severe disabilities, particularly cerebral palsy (CP).

The current project, funded by the Presbyterian Health Foundation and the Foundation for Physical Therapy investigates whether infants with or at high risk of CP can learn to independently move and explore their home environment using the SIPPC. The SIPPC is a motorized wheeled platform with an onboard computer designed to sense and assist the infant’s effort to move. The infant’s intended direction is sensed though a combination of position encoders and force transducers embedded in the device. To date no intervention or device has been used with infants with disabilities or at risk for CP to enable them to independently explore their environment during the first year of life, which simultaneously gathers information about their learning strategies. Because of the inter-connection between prone progression and other domains of infants’ development, and its development coincides with the period of highly active synaptic formation in the brain, we hypothesize that the ability to move independently with the aid of the SIPPC could have far-reaching benefits beyond improving motor performance for infants with disabilities or those or at risk for CP.

This work is the results of collaborations among researchers from the Departments of Rehabilitation Science at the Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center and Virginia Commonwealth University, and the College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma.