High-Level Mobility Assessment Tool (HiMAT): interrater reliability, retest reliability, and internal consistency.

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The High-Level Mobility Assessment Tool (HiMAT) assesses high-level mobility in people who have sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI). The purpose of this study was to investigate the interrater reliability, retest reliability, and internal consistency of data obtained with the HiMAT. SUBJECTS: Three physical therapists and 103 people with TBI were recruited from a rehabilitation hospital. METHODS: Three physical therapists concurrently assessed a subset of 17 subjects with TBI to investigate interrater reliability. One physical therapist assessed a different subset of 20 subjects with TBI on 2 occasions, 2 days apart, to investigate retest reliability. Data from the entire sample of 103 subjects were used to investigate the internal consistency of this new scale. RESULTS: Both the interrater reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient [ICC]=.99) and the retest reliability (ICC=.99) of the HiMAT data were very high. For retest reliability, a small systematic change was detected (t=3.82, df=19), indicating a marginal improvement of 1 point at retest. Internal consistency also was very high (Cronbach alpha=.97). DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: The HiMAT is a new tool specifically designed to measure high-level mobility, which currently is not a component of existing scales used in TBI. This study demonstrated that the HiMAT is a reliable tool for measuring high-level mobility.