There is a growing gap between the number of children with autism requiring early intervention and available therapy. In this project we seek to produce the following outcomes: * Flexible frameworks for stimulus presentation and recording, for early intervention in social and cognitive/visual areas, * Open source infrastructures to leverage content and metadata from social media, constructing foundations for reusable content in early intervention, * Assistive Technologies for finding appropriate information from forums and blogs, focusing on autism, * Early warning systems of mental wellbeing, measuring affect in text-based social media (forums, blogs, etc.) and appropriate triggers for social support. * New tools for assistive support for communication and social function.
Our partners are: Autism West, Gateways, Barwon health. We do this project jointly with our colleagues at Curtin University.
Our Contributions: We present a portable platform for pervasive delivery of early intervention therapy using multi-touch interfaces and principled ways to deliver stimuli of increasing complexity and adapt to a child’s performance. Our implementation weaves Natural Environment Tasks with iPad tasks, facilitating a learning platform that integrates early intervention in the child’s daily life. The system’s construction of stimulus complexity relative to task is evaluated by therapists, together with field trials for evaluating both the integrity of the instructional design and goal of stimulus presentation and adjustment relative to performance for learning tasks. We show overwhelmingly positive results across all our stakeholders, children, parents and therapists. Our results have implications for other early learning fields that require principled ways to construct lessons across skills and adjust stimuli relative to performance. See Toby Playpad. The Technology won the 2011 Curtin University Commercialization award.