Title: An investigation into the provision of ICT to support behavioural monitoring of children with autism
Funder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Abstract: Autism is a developmental disorder, which usually diagnosed in children before the age of three years old. It is estimated to affect approximately 1 in 100 children and is characterised by a range of behavioural excesses and deficits in the areas of social imagination, communication and social interaction. These behaviours often pose significant challenges to parents or caregivers and affect the development of positive and adaptive skills. A number of approaches exist that aim to reduce such socially challenging behaviours while increasing socially significant ones. The most notable evidence-based approach is Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA). Using the core principles of ABA, Behaviour Analysts (BAs) aim to increase/decrease behaviours through a process of understanding the events that occur before and after a behaviour. By understanding these events (the function), procedures can be implemented, which attempt to modify the behaviour. As a result, maintaing careful data collection are essential in order to identify the causes and effects surrounding behaviours. As the emphasis is on early intervention, children are usually of a pre-school age when they commence home-based intervention programmes. During these programmes, parents typically carry out their own behavioural collection procedures due to the predominant lack of availability and high cost associated with BAs. Subsequently, a typical care model involves parents taking a pivotal role in their child's development by 'learning' to deliver autism intervention programmes supported by home-based therapists, under the direction of a BA. Although paper-based methods exist for supporting data collection, such records are commonly misreported. Reasons for this include the workload involved in implementing and coordinating ABA programmes that do not afford much time to record specific events as they happen and manual collection is cumbersome and impractical especially for those behaviours occurring outside of the home environment. Additionally, parents/therapists often find it difficult to accurately identify the triggers surrounding a behaviour. As a result, there is often missing/incomplete data, which in turn leads to delays in understanding the function of a behaviour. As a consequence of the issues surrounding behavioural monitoring, a partnership has formed between the University of Ulster and PEAT, a Northern Ireland Autism charity dedicated towards supporting home-based autism intervention. Together, we believe that a Connected Health care model similar to that, which has been applied to support conditions such as dementia and chronic disease management can help to improve home-based autism intervention, particularly in the area of behavioural data collection and analysis. Using a clinically-led and user-driven design methodology we aim to investigate and develop a suite of ICT services. Specifically, we will build upon developments in smart-phone technology to provide a touch-based interface for parents/therapist that supports fast data entry. An underlying decision support algorithm will guide Users through the recording process, thus permitting the flagging of specific behaviours. Furthermore, a clinical web-portal will be developed to allow BAs to remotely assess the progress of ABA programmes and to respond to queries and provide feedback to the smart-phone users. Surrounding these services will be a central data repository to store all of the information recorded and linked to this will be a set of data mining algorithms which will inform BAs about any underlying correlations between behaviours and their respective causes and effects. In this way, we aim to provide a knowledge-base that will reduce the time required to determine the function of a behaviour. Addressing this aim will allow the project to support improved compliance, accuracy and user satisfaction among all users and ultimately serve to promote improved autism intervention.


Research activity codes: 7.1 INDIVIDUAL CARE NEEDS
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH