Capturing and managing daily symptoms data in the treatment of autism spectrum disorder using mobile technology
Authors:   , Amnuaikiatloet Thunpisit 
Published: December 2023

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Autism Symptom Disorder (ASD) is a heterogeneous group of neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by difficulties with social interaction and communication, and restricted and repetitive behavior. Collaboration with Dr.Kristin Sohl, MD; pediatrician with extensive experience in the treatment of children with a concern of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. The goal of this research was to build a mHealth application that would help capture and monitor the daily symptoms and activities of ASD patients. It would eventually improve the lives of families of children with Autism by helping them track significant symptoms and behaviors changes. This application helps them communicate with their care team, including doctors, therapists, and teachers. The mHealth app, Autism Assists provides a simple tracking process that provides fast and easy access for caregivers to record patients' behaviors, moods, and general health symptoms. The app reduces the need for paper tracking and bulky binders. Overall, the app is easy and cost effective way to track and access ASD patients progress. One of our main focuses of developing mHealth and applications is security and privacy. Sensitive individual health information becomes widely available and accessible through smartphones and wearable devices. It is critical for developers to use and store personal health information securely, and comply with government regulations of the user's privacy. References Architecture (RA) was utilized to help identify HIPA implementation requirements and security measures that satisfy these requirements. Amazon Web Services GovCloud, which allows a small team of developers access to many powerful tools and services that offer an HIPAA Compliances environment at an inexpensive cost, was chosen to store patients data in the backend. Autism Assists is able to help track of a patient's activity through the mHealth app, a web app for administration, and technique that was used to build the RESTful APIs and database. The process of building applications from designing user interfaces was discussed and concerns about the user's experience functionality, and components within each platform. The app was deployed and tested through a pilot-study. IRB approval was obtained for the pilot-study. With challenges from recruitment and maintaining active patients, the flaw in the system had become clear, daily manual logs are not the best practices, and we cannot rely on users to input daily logs. To eliminate manual input logs, the researchers added the features that automated patient's data collection by integrating applications and services from wearable device providers such as Withings and Apple. By building an app using Flutter, a cross-platform mobile framework that provided user permission to access patients' health data from AppleHealth with iOS platform. Accessing health data of the user's Withings devices from Withings by asking the user to grants permission provided OAuth 2.0 flow. The health data, both incoming and outgoing, were treated in the data pipeline and RESTful APIs that were developed.