Artificial intelligence or AI is making news headlines virtually every day. The things AI can accomplish couldn’t have been dreamt of in previous generations. Now, our society is leaping towards an AI future with nearly limitless opportunities. One area in which the medical community has already seen some promise in AI is its ability to assist children with autism.
Early Diagnosis Provides the Greatest Benefits for Children With Autism
The sooner that a child can be diagnosed with autism, the sooner they can receive the care and support that they need. AI is aiding the early diagnosis of autism in children. Some of the ways that AI technology aided with this include the following:
- Uploading Videos of Children for Diagnosis. Artificial intelligence has made it possible to upload videos of children and have the technology offer an autism diagnosis in that child. The technology reviews the video frame by frame to determine if there are signs of autism that the child exhibits. If so, the program will provide that diagnosis.
- Smart Glasses for Aid With Social Situations. One of the most challenging things for individuals with autism is learning how to cope with certain challenging social situations. However, smart glasses are assisting children with autism in these situations. These glasses can discreetly whisper instructions to the child to let them know how they might want to behave in a challenging social situation that might have otherwise baffled them.
- Robot Therapists. This technology is still under development (as are the others mentioned here). However, there are robot therapists that can aid children with autism to get some things off of their minds and out of their hearts.
These tools are already in use in some places. They make it a lot easier for children with autism to receive services that were not available to them before.
Unraveling a Complex Diagnosis
One of the reasons why children with autism have faced many obstacles in life in the past is simply because the diagnosis of autism is not easy to do. It is a complex disorder that doctors still study. VeryWell Health explains that delays in the diagnosis of autism are quite common:
There are several reasons why delays occur. There is no single obvious autism trait, and some autism traits can also occur with other, unrelated disorders or personality differences. Evaluators may be uncertain whether a particular behavior is part of an autistic pattern or just a personal idiosyncrasy, and many evaluators and parents hesitate to pin a label on a child until they’re absolutely certain the diagnosis is correct.
Autism is complex and it is easy for certain aspects of it to be misunderstood as something else. Therefore, it is critical to know how artificial intelligence might prove useful in autism diagnosis and treatment.
Deep Learning Means AI Continues to Improve
The value of AI comes from the fact that it continues to learn as it adds more and more data and information to it. They design these programs to gobble up as much data as they can. This is to continue to add to their ability to perform their tasks. Artificial intelligence will continue to gain in its ability. We as a society will continue to move toward a deeper and more complete understanding of autism. For more information on how this will impact children with autism, please reach out and contact us.