Autism ASSISTant

Virtual assistant for the enhancement of cognitive skills of children with an autism spectrum disorder.

Autism ASSISTant is a research & development project awarded within the CENTRIC project, which stands for Center for knowledge transfer to enterprises in the ICT field. 

The project envisages research activities to create an intelligent software platform dedicated to developing the autonomy of children affected by autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This will be accomplished by creating modules designed to contribute to their cognitive development, enhance their memory and reasoning, and other social and practical skills needed for daily routines.

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To ensure that the needs of children with autism and their caretakers are met, the project will be implemented by a multidisciplinary team of IT specialists, researchers, and ABA therapists (Applied Behavior Analysis). 

Early intervention is essential to maximizing a child's learning potential, but diagnosis is often delayed for various reasons, including parents' reluctance to accept that their child may have a disorder and a lack of access to specialized services. This prevents autistic children from receiving therapy at a younger age, potentially impeding their development. Therefore, it is crucial to inform parents about early signs of autism and protocols for working with children from different age groups, starting as early as two months old, which is precisely what one of the proposed modules will do.  

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Children with autism or other developmental disorders need around 4 to 6 hours of individual therapy daily, and continuous intervention to generalize and consolidate the notions and behaviors learned during therapy sessions with specialists. This is why parents or other family members must be trained to become co-therapists for their child.  

Autism ASSISTant is designed to allow parents and caretakers to continue the therapy process at home with the help of professional guidelines by using predefined data, which could be updated anytime on a specific web page.

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Having a generalization and initial preparation on these methods of therapy, Autism ASSISTant continues with creating and playing different game scenarios (on different environments like bathroom or park) that would apply ABA principles during the therapy sessions.

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☆ Objectives:

• Designing and implementing Autism ASSISTant modules meant to enable caretakers to continue the learning programs from therapy sessions at home, integrating them into the child’s routine  
• Developing the autonomy of children affected by autism spectrum disorders  
• Enabling parents to become co-therapists, thereby supporting the child’s developmental progress  
• Early detection of autism symptoms  

ASSIST Software will conduct research and development activities and be responsible for UI/UX prototyping, software architecture elaboration, and software development of multiple components, such as frontend, backend, AI, ML, VR, and AR. 

Project ID: Nr. 22080/05.10.2022 

Funding: European Regional Development Fund, Competitiveness Operational Programme 2014-2020, CENTRIC