The Patient Guidance Project was created by a team of research assistants in the Arizona Cancer Evolution Center as a source of supplemental education and support for recently diagnosed cancer patients. Extensive background research in the form of literature reviews highlighted disparities between the information patients want and are receiving, as well as between average literacy levels of patients and the literacy levels at which cancer information is commonly provided. The Patient Guidance Project has published comprehensive guides for specific types of cancer, which so far include metastatic melanoma, glioblastoma, prostate cancer, oral cancer, kidney cancer, breast cancer, and colorectal cancer. The content of the guides is intended to bridge the gaps in information for patients with an emphasis on treatment options, treatment side effects, and psychological support resources, which surveys have identified as the topics patients want information on most. Written at a sixth-grade literacy level, which over half of adults in the U.S. read at, the guides are meant to be of benefit to as many people as possible. In the future, the team hopes to expand the Patient Guidance Project to include more cancer types, guides in different languages, and multimodal features to increase their effectiveness.

The increase of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) cases in recent war history has increased the urgency of research regarding how veterans are affected by TBIs. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of TBI on speech recognition in noise. The AzBio Sentence Test was completed for signal-to-noise ratios (S/N) from -10 dB to +15 dB for a control group of ten participants and one US military veteran with history of service-connected TBI. All participants had normal hearing sensitivity defined as thresholds of 20 dB or better at frequencies from 250-8000 Hz in addition to having tympanograms within normal limits. Comparison of the data collected on the control group versus the veteran suggested that the veteran performed worse than the majority of the control group on the AzBio Sentence Test. Further research with more participants would be beneficial to our understanding of how veterans with TBI perform on speech recognition tests in the presence of background noise.