Seedlabs

CDS Norm Bank: Pooled Percentile Norms for Disengagement Scales

A shared data service that helps doctors understand if a child's daydreaming score is high compared to other kids their age.

A data-sharing service that pools de-identified cognitive disengagement syndrome questionnaire results from many clinics and schools to build continuously updated age- and sex-stratified percentile norms, so clinicians can finally say what a 'high' CDS score means.

MedicineAttention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity DisorderPsychological test publishing / clinical assessment analytics

Concept

A data-pooling and scoring service that turns raw CDS rating-scale responses into interpretable numbers. Participating clinics, schools, and research sites administer validated CDS scales as part of routine care and contribute de-identified item-level responses; the service aggregates them into continuously refreshed, age- and sex-stratified normative percentiles and returns standardized scores through an API. Contributors get instant percentile interpretation for their own patients; test publishers license the norm bank for their scoring software. The single wedge is solving the normative-data problem: converting a raw CDS score into a defensible percentile like "98th for a 9-year-old boy."

Why now

Paper [0] explicitly names "the importance of gathering normative data" as one of its ten key research domains — the review confirms psychometrically rigorous CDS tools exist, but the field lacks the population reference data needed to interpret an individual's score in the clinic. Older paper [1], the international work group report, likewise prioritized assessment development as a key direction for the renamed construct. Because the scales are already validated, the bottleneck is purely data aggregation — a commercial data-network problem (pooling, stratifying, refreshing norms) rather than a discovery problem, which is exactly the kind of gap a norms service can fill without waiting for new science.

Written by GLM · 10 Oct 2026

AI assessment

Backed by 2 papers86

A highly focused data-network play that solves a specific, documented bottleneck in clinical psychology by aggregating normative data for a validated but under-normed construct.

Evidence strength
5/5
The idea directly addresses a specific research gap ('importance of gathering normative data') explicitly cited in the provided literature as a key priority for the CDS construct.
Market pull
4/5
Clinical assessment publishers (Pearson) and large health systems (Kaiser) have a clear incentive to provide standardized, defensible scores to clinicians to improve diagnostic accuracy.
Novelty & moat
3/5
While similar to the 'Girl- and Age-Normed Scoring Module,' it differentiates by creating a cross-institutional pooled bank for a specific, emerging syndrome rather than just re-centering existing ADHD scales.
Feasibility
4/5
The technical requirement is a secure data pipeline and a statistical scoring engine; the primary challenge is the legal/administrative hurdle of data-sharing agreements.
Wedge clarity
5/5
The wedge is extremely sharp: converting a raw CDS score into a specific percentile (e.g., '98th for a 9-year-old boy'), solving one precise pain point.
Simplicity / focus
5/5
The product is a single, focused utility—a norm bank API—avoiding the trap of building a broad diagnostic platform.

Scored by Gemma 4 · 10 Oct 2026. Rated against a fixed rubric (evidence, market, novelty, feasibility, wedge, simplicity), relative to the closest ideas already in the catalog. A prior estimate to compare ideas before real-world signal arrives.

Persona discussion

AI personas trained on real people's expertise debate this idea as it evolves.

View the discussion →

Act on this idea

Ideas only matter if someone runs with them. Your message goes straight to the founder's inbox — nothing is stored on our servers.

Who benefits

  • MHS (Multi-Health Systems)company

    Publishes the Conners rating scales, which include CDS content; continuously updated age- and sex-stratified norms would directly strengthen score interpretation in its flagship ADHD assessment product.

  • Pearson Clinical Assessmentcompany

    Norm refreshes are a recurring, expensive obligation for test publishers; a pooled-norms service gives them current stratified norms without funding standalone national data collection.

  • NIMHorganization

    Funds classification and assessment research; normative CDS data infrastructure addresses a research priority the review explicitly names, at far lower cost than investigator-initiated collection.

  • Kaiser Permanenteorganization

    Integrated health system screening large pediatric populations; contributing routine data earns interpretable CDS percentiles for its clinicians without building norms in-house.

Research it builds on

  1. Report of a Work Group on Sluggish Cognitive Tempo: Key Research Directions and a Consensus Change in Terminology to Cognitive Disengagement Syndrome
    Stephen P. Becker, Erik G. Willcutt, Daniel R. Leopold et al. · 2022 · 172 citations
    All ideas from this paper →
  2. Cognitive disengagement syndrome: A construct at the crossroads.
    Stephen P. Becker · 2025 · 44 citations
    All ideas from this paper →
Leave feedback
feasibility