AUTOMATING DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL AND EDUCATIONAL TREATMENTS FOR AUTISM

Children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) experience persistent difficulties in the social use of communication and show restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior. The most popular interventions for ASD involve highly structured activities, focused on helping the child acquiring verbal and non-verbal communication skills and decreasing disruptive behaviors both in occurrence and intensity. Many behavioral intervention programs in treatment for Autism requires therapists to collect and analyze data, in order to track progress and set individual goals. The therapist needs to gather data and collect them on standardized data sheets while conducting the intervention, then analyze it by hand or using some ad-hoc software. Further elaborations are needed for presenting such statistics to teachers and parents in order to help them understand issues and progressions of the treatment. While working on L.I.A.R. (Language Interface for Autistic's Rehabilitation), a software for teaching communication skills to children with autism, our research team created a model to automate the entire process, helping the therapist in the collection and the subsequent reporting of data in the training of communication skills. Our software logs every interaction with the tablet, including environmental data such as the location, with a to-the-room accuracy, of where the interaction occurred. We are also starting to log the interactions with many physical objects available in our rehabilitation facility and in the children's house, in order to detect the effectiveness of the treatment also where the therapist is not with the young patient. The collected data is automatically analyzed by our software and presented to the caregivers in a simple, straightforward format, as a report tailored for the target audience. Our software is currently being used by 10 families and 5 therapists, volunteered for a pilot study.