PLAY.CARE – revolution in early detection and therapy of autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

Project Information

PLAY.CARE

Grant agreement ID: 756079

DOI

10.3030/756079

Project closed

EC signature date 4 April 2017

Start date 1 May 2017

End date 31 October 2019

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 2 267 500,00

EU contribution

€ 1 587 250,00

Coordinated by

HARIMATA SP ZOO
Poland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PLAY.CARE (PLAY.CARE – revolution in early detection and therapy of autism spectrum disorders (ASD).)

Reporting period: 2017-05-01 to 2018-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Autism is a serious developmental disability. Children with autism, also known as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), have social, communication and language problems. Prevalence estimates are alarming, with 1 in very 68 children being diagnosed with ASD in Europe. There is no cure for ASD. However, for many children, ASD symptoms improve with treatment and age.
Early diagnosis and therapy intervention can help children with autism to significantly improve their language and behavioural skills. However, current ASD diagnosis methods fail to deliver. Most cases of child developmental disorders are detected much too late.
Recognizing the striking gap in the ASD diagnostics landscape, we have developed and preliminarily validated, in cooperation with leading ASD experts, a disruptive technology for early detection of ASD, based on the latest research on movement patterns as early markers of autism.
PLAY.CARE has the potential to become a new ‘gold standard’ method for early autism detection and will lead to more timely detection of autism. Our aim is to scale the technology into clinical use worldwide, providing a reliable, easy-to-use, affordable and widely accessible diagnostic and therapy monitoring tool.
The missing element to realise this vision is highest standard clinical evidence that will hold against all scientific scrutiny. Our objective is to obtain this evidence through the clinical validation pilot within the SME Instrument project and execute the necessary optimization and scalability of PLAY.CARE in light of market introduction.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The PLAY.CARE project is progressing according to the general timeline. Study Protocol was developed by leading researchers in the field of autism diagnosis and therapy. Ethics approvals to conduct clinical studies were received from relevant Committees in the United Kingdom and Sweden. Currently, the validation study is ongoing and is foreseen to be finished by the end of the year. Our team visited several therapeutic centres which are diagnosing and treating autism and their valuable feedback on PLAY.CARE application was gathered. At the moment, we finished defining specification for the final product to support diagnosis of autism. We target high sensitivity and specificity of the autism detection algorithms as well as the best possible user-friendliness.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

PLAY.CARE enables detection of autism at the earlier stage than it currently is. The ongoing clinical trials include children aged 3 years old and above.
Early detection and intervention can help children with autism to permanently improve their language and behavioural skills, and raise their intelligence quotients (IQs) dramatically, according to published studies. After two years on the Early Start Denver Model program for example, several children’s diagnoses even shifted to a milder form of the disorder. Autistic adults who got the right treatment when they were young, are often highly sought after by many companies, as they excel in specific areas such as data analysis or software programming.
Early detection of autism can save millions of euros for European healthcare systems: Autism Society studies estimate that early diagnosis and intervention can improve the lives of affected and reduce cost of lifelong care by 2/3.

Play.Care data flow

Play.Care application run on a tablet

A child using Play.Care