The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given clearance to the Defense Automated Neurobehavioral Assessment, a mobile phone-based app designed to help medical providers identify traumatic brain injury in as little as five minutes. More than 27,000 such injuries were reported globally across all four main service branches in 2013, according to the DoD, and tools to help improve understanding and diagnosis of brain injury in the field are becoming a priority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Known as DANA, the app runs on a variety of platforms and operates like a video game, featuring onscreen exercises gauged for speed and accuracy. Service members who may have had a head injury participate in DANA’s cognitive efficiency tests and self-administrated questionnaires, and clinicians compare their results to baseline exercises. Reaction time could be impacted by concussion, dementia, post-traumatic stress, depression and fatigue, among others factors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“In essence, measuring reaction time is like taking the temperature of the brain,” said Corinna Lathan, founder and CEO of AnthroTronix, Inc., the Maryland-based research and development company that created DANA, in an article on army.mil. “It’s a vital part of the data that any health professional needs to evaluate his patient.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next step will be to get the tool fully validated for battlefield use and in the hands of medical providers, who could use it to assess fitness for duty and triage needs in any setting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
DANA, a mobile phone-based video game-like app that gauges reaction time, will help identify head injury in any setting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":63131,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":38,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[8,16,38],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1255],"class_list":["post-21426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c2-comms","category-it-networks","category-mobility"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"7OF22H5LERBPNOSEYAYJPHUJHI","arc_canonical_url":"\/c2-comms\/mobility\/2015\/01\/08\/fda-clears-traumatic-brain-injury-diagnosis-app\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n