: This project convenes a team of behavioral, social, and clinician scientists to plan a clinical study involving an assessment process for setting meaningful patient goals and computing health-related quality of life (QoL)-weighted outcomes. Rehabilitation goals will be set through a recovery simulation process by which rehabilitation consumers (patients and or family members) identify the functional abilities they want to regain and the types of symptoms they most want to resolve. The process will work through a computer aided assessment tool to be modified from research protocols designed to generate utilities about alternative states of being. The simulation process will be designed to yield quantitative rankings of functional abilities based on the relative meaningfulness of being able to perform them, combined with ethnographic information highlighting why one functional ability or type of symptom control appears more important than others to the consumer. This three-year project represents the first step toward development of the process of virtual recovery simulation. The PIs will establish criteria for the selection of appropriate health and functional status instruments in support of the process, address complex methodological issues related to the development of this new technology, and establish a standardized simulation approach for rehabilitation practice appropriate for the next phase of research. Through the process of simulating recovery, the patient will be able to quickly integrate his or her culture, personal experiences, knowledge about potential caregivers, desired areas of life participation, past and future environments of living, and other important life contexts in formulating and articulating how he or she would recover if the order of recovery were fully controllable. Clinicians can combine patients' measured functional performance and symptoms with their utilities from simulation to generate QoL-weighted measures. The consumers' personal reflections during the simulation process will help clinicians interpret the patient's future rehabilitation experience and needs in the context of the socially and culturally constructed realm in which the patient will ultimately reside outside the artificial clinical world.
