AOTA on April 14

There were so many so many speeches at the same time. The participants really needed to work on which speeches are the preferences ahead of time in order to have the seat in the room. In the beginning, it was hard to make the decision which I prefer to listen first. When I made up my mind, some of the speeches were so popular and it would be not available to get in the room.

In the morning, I helped out Letty to post Dr. Pan's poster, and then I looked through most of the posters. In Taiwan, most of the poster presenters were gone in OT conferences. In the AOTA conference, the poster presenters needed to stand by their poster and try to explain any questions or share how the research study was done. Then the presenters would give the audiences the sticker. Each audience needed to get 10 stickers to gain the educational credits.
In this poster session, lots of the research studies were relative to the OT educational (academic) and pediatric fields. Moreover, quite a lot of research studies used qualitative research method.
I have seen that one presenter's poster was lost during the shipping and she drew some notes talking about the mistake of shipping and the main ideas of her poster. It attracted so many attentions, because of her attitudes showing never giving up and her body languages of presenting her research studies.

During the poster session, I met some Taiwanese who worked or studied in the US. After the poster session, some of them took me to the traditional food market to have Amish sandwich. Wow! There was so crowded and there were some people sining in the middle. By that moment, I kind of woke up and started to feel hungry, since I was still in jet lag and my stomach was not feeling well.

In the afternoon, originally I wanted to listen to the topic "The compelling evidence for motor learning practices in occupation-based neurorehabilitation: theory and principles of scientific practice". However, the room was full and I was not allowed to get in. Then I went to listen to another short topic "Development of a functional capacity evaluation of work performance for individuals with mild to moderate stroke". The presenter shared how she developed a assessment testing work ability for the people with stroke. She said about 3 or 4 times that she felt executive function was important for work. She also stated

• Needing a model before starting a developing a assessment, which helped her having a clear picture what she needed to do.
• Starting with a structured interview to know what elements were needed in the assessment tool.
• two measures, O*NET and MOCA. If I did not misunderstand, these were related to cognition.
• how she did pilot study of the content of her measure, and then doing the studies of psychometric properties. 

In the evening, there were a welcome ceremony, a expo grand opening, and reception. I stayed with my ex-advisor, Esther Huecker who was associate professor in Loma Linda University. This was my first time to meet her face to face. When I was in Loma Linda University, her husband was sick seriously. So, I have no chances to meet her. She was so nice to introduce some people to me and share the main ideas of the speech in the welcome opening.
In the welcome opening, there was a vocal bank to sing songs to start the opening, and American people were so excited and dancing.  Esther's friend said there were more and more informal performance in the AOTA welcome opening.
In the expo grand opening, there were so many booths from schools,health care institutes, and companies selling books, assistive technology, and toys. And I could get some free stuff from the booths.
I looked at the books related to cognition, but I did not find out anything new or special about executive functions. Keep trying to open the eyes and seeing whether I could have some difference ideas for my EF research framework.