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

Informazioni relative al progetto

PLAY.CARE

ID dell’accordo di sovvenzione: 756079

DOI

10.3030/756079

Progetto chiuso

Data della firma CE 4 Aprile 2017

Data di avvio 1 Maggio 2017

Data di completamento 31 Ottobre 2019

Finanziato da

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

Costo totale

€ 2 267 500,00

Contributo UE

€ 1 587 250,00

Coordinato da

HARIMATA SP ZOO
Poland

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

Periodo di rendicontazione: 2017-05-01 al 2018-04-30

Sintesi del contesto e degli obiettivi generali del progetto

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.

Lavoro eseguito dall’inizio del progetto fino alla fine del periodo coperto dalla relazione e principali risultati finora ottenuti

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.

Progressi oltre lo stato dell’arte e potenziale impatto previsto (incluso l’impatto socioeconomico e le implicazioni sociali più ampie del progetto fino ad ora)

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