ABILHAND Assessment

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Objective

The ABILHAND is an interview-based assessment of a patient-reported measure of the perceived difficulty in using their hand to perform manual activities in daily activities. The assessment considers the active function of the upper limbs and measures the ability to perform bimanual tasks, regardless of the way in which these tasks are carried out. All of the versions of the assessment are available for from the following website and contain all of the assessment information, downloads of the pack and also the link to the rasch analysis.

There are currently versions specifically validated for

Chronic stroke, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Systemic sclerosis, Hand Surgery

These test packs are also available in many languages such as English, French, Dutch, Italian, Swedish, Brazilian-Portuguese, Chinese, Canadian English, Canadian French, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, UK English, Spanish USA, Bulgarian, Austrian German, Swiss German, Swiss-French, Norwegian, Slovak, Argentinian Spanish, Mexican Spanish.

Instructions

This is an interview-based assessment where the patient is asked to estimate the ease or difficulty of performing a list of activities when carried out without assistance. This can involve any strategy used to carry out the activity, and is self-report and not a physical demonstration of the activity.

The questionnaire is downloaded from the website and one of the 10 random orders of questions. These are read to the patient and scored as either "impossible", "difficult" or "easy". If a task has not been attempted in the last 3 months then it is marked as N/A.

Scoring & Interpretation

Analysis of the answers is via a Rasch model of online analysis, which converts the raw scores into a linear measure.

The output of the online analysis is presented as the patient's manual ability (indicated by a red line) alongside the 95% confidence interval. The better the patient's ability, the more the line will be located on the right.

From the output scoresheet, items are ordered from the easiest task at the bottom, to the hardest task at the top. The most likely score according to the difficulty is given and changes according to the patient's manual ability. This allows the score to be used for treatment planning as easier tasks should have recovered first. Outliers or unexpected findings are also noted. See Fig 1.

Evidence

The ABILHAND measure has been

Reliability

Validity

Responsiveness

Limitations

Miscellaneous

Related articles

References