ABLE.

A user-friendly app that aims to resolve the struggles that parents of autistic children face.

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Inspiration

Autism is a complex developmental disorder characterized by repetitive behaviors and impaired abilities. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), autism is the fastest growing developmental disorder, affecting more than 3.5 million individuals in the United States alone. One of our team members was thought to have autism at the age of 3. She was still unable to speak and had to go through several months of speech and occupational therapy. As hard as it was for her, no one realized the struggles that her parents had to undergo. They had trouble finding the best resources and therapies to help her, while also balancing out their social and financial lives.

Turns out that this is the case of millions of parents. Autism not only affects the individual who has it, but their family members as well. A great shift of focus to the child’s needs pushes away the parent’s other priorities, affecting their social and work life. A lot of responsibility is put in the parents' hands as they need to ensure that their autistic child is healthy and growing up in a good environment. Furthermore, the child’s future relies on the quality of care that parents give their child. The inability to effectively communicate with their child due to the complexities of the disorder often leaves parents confused, tired, and hopeless.

On top of all this, there is no single resource out there, either a website or app, that gives parents the help that they need without having a cost. The absence of this solution, for something that affects millions of parents all around the world, inspired us to create our app, ABLE.

Our Solution

We spoke with a couple of parents of autistic kids to talk about the different struggles that they face in daily life, and ABLE was born as a solution to those struggles. It aims to ease the load that many of them experience when taking care of an autistic child. It does this by helping parents understand autism better, and in turn, their child, give them tips for how to handle and cope with their child’s autism, an extensive list of resources for therapy and help (as many parents struggle to afford this), a to-do list which helps a parent to set goals, and an ability assessment and imitation feature to help parents nurture their children's abilities at home. We also created a website which accompanies our app and includes additional features and information. After conducting thorough research, we ensure that the features of our app are verified to help parents. ABLE is the only app of its kind, and costs absolutely nothing for parents to get the help that they need, all in one place.

What it does

Autism 101, our first button, is a guide to everything you need to know about autism. Next, there’s therapy. This button lists many helpful resources, including buttons to our website and youtube channel. Tips comes after. This page is divided into two sections and has useful tips for both parents and autistic children. To-Do List is directed towards the use of the parents, as they can often become busy. This feature simply allows an individual to type in a task and remove it when they’ve completed it. Next, there’s an ability test. This test can track the child’s progress of learning different things such as learning colors, places, objects, while still being interactive and fun. Imitate is another feature of the app that focuses on teaching autistic children. Parents can simply type in multiple words or phrases for the app to speak out loud and repeat. Last but not least is the About the App button. This button simply explains the purpose of the app, what it can do, and who it’s for.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge that we encountered was choosing a problem that our app could address or potentially solve. At first, we had many wonderful ideas but each one had some sort of solution that already existed. We finally stuck with the one that hit close to home and that we were passionate about. AUTISM. Both of us had never used MIT App Inventor before, so figuring out how to code and what certain blocks did was also a challenge. We went through several online tutorials and explored different things that could be coded into the app. After several hours of playing around with the app, we finally got the hang of it. A major thing that we incorporated into our app, but that was difficult to do, was therapy. After doing extensive research on what therapy is best for children with autism, we found that the most effective therapy requires face- to -face interaction. However, learning about the importance of early intervention (therapy) and the financial struggles of some parents to afford professional therapy, we found a way to provide parents with this therapy in the best possible way without face- to- face interaction. We did this by creating original videos explaining to parents how they can perform this therapy in the comforts of their own home, with the presence of their child. The content in our videos is verified by special need therapists. Lastly, when coding our ability test, we found that our score count would go over the limit when a button was pressed multiple times. We searched for videos that would help us code the quiz buttons so that it could only add one point, regardless of how many times it was pressed. To our avail, we could not find any resource that gave us a direct solution. However, we overcame this by applying some previous knowledge of coding and combining little ideas from various videos.

Lessons Learned

While coding elements of our app, we learned the true meaning and importance of what we were doing and who we were helping. Autism affects so many people, and by making the app, we can help millions upon millions of people. Colin Powell once said, “a dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination, and hard work”. We learned just that throughout the whole process of making our app. We realized the effort, dedication, and time that it took to perfect our work.

What's next for ABLE.

We want ABLE to be a default app in all autism parents’ mobiles. For this, we plan to speak to professionals and therapists to recommend our app to parents of autistic children as ABLE covers all aspects of aid that a parent needs. We also want to make more therapy videos and this includes different types of therapy such as Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA), visual, etc. After learning more about the financial issues that parents face with affording therapy, the necessity for this became more apparent to us. We also learned that support groups are a major help to autism parents and we want to make it more convenient for the parent by allowing them to put their address in our app while it pulls up support group areas near them. Last but not least, we want to make more challenging ability tests that can assess different aspects of a child’s ability. While we still see space for improvement for ABLE, we believe that our app has the potential to make so many people’s lives easier.

ABLE was created by Annasimone Halim and Shreya Gundam of Enloe High School Academy of Health Sciences, Raleigh, NC.

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