Autism Every Day: Take 7 minutes and watch this video! Update- read the comments about the controversy this video generated...

UPDATED COMMENT:

The "Autism Every Day" video came to my attention from a parent of a young adult with severe autism who also works as an advocate. The video was also shared by a director of an advocacy/support agency who previously worked with students with severe autism and cognitive delays as a special educator.

After I posted this video, I received a comment from Liz Ditz about the controversy that this video generated within the autism community. Part of the problem is that the video did not depict any positive scenes. For example, if the purpose of the video's creators was to generate awareness of the needs of families raising children with autism, it might have been useful to devote some time showing families who experienced positive outcomes and specific examples of the supports have been put into place.

My deep concern is that in my state (and others),  funding was significantly cut for community support services for young people with severe autism, as well as for young people with severe psychiatric disorders, as well as their families. Special education funds were cut, and we have been prepared to expect a "funding cliff" at the end of the 2010-11 school year.  Related services providers in the schools, such as speech/language therapists and occupational therapists have larger caseloads than in the past, and in some cases, are not replaced if they move.

Below are my original comments, written in an attempt to bring awareness that our schools, community support agencies, and health care systems need to provide more supports for the growing number of children, teens, and young adults with autism spectrum disorders and their families.

ORIGINAL COMMENT
The children with autism in this video are young, and in no time will reach their teen and young adult years. I work with teens and young adults with severe autism in my job as a school psychologist. We need to prepare our middle and high schools for the increased numbers of young people coming through the doors.

If you know of a similar video that targets the needs of teens and young adults with autism, please let me know, and I will share it on this blog and my on-line social networks. I would be willing to help produce a similar video locally, with the cooperation of parents, if one has not yet been produced.

Note: This video will include positive vignettes!

Video Modeling and Social Skills Development: Scott Bellini and Tom Buggey's Resources

Scott Bellini is an assistant professor in the area of School Psychology in the Counseling and Educational Psychology department at Indiana University. His work focuses on social skills development with children and teens who have autism spectrum disorders. He is known for his research in the area of video modeling. He is also the author of the book, Building Social Relationships: A Systematic Approach to Teaching Social Interaction Skills to Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Other Social Difficulties.

Dr. Bellini is involved with the Indiana Institute on Disabilities, which sponsors the Autism Resources website.

It is worth taking the time to explore the Autism Resources website/blog. There you will find a descriptions of resources for children, teens, parents, and teachers. The resources include books, videos, websites, and related events. Some of the links are to education-related websites that also include information related to autism spectrum disorders, such as links to fairly recent article on the Edutopia website by Fran Smith that highlights the problem facing public schools schools in dealing with the increase in the number of students with autism spectrum disorders.

Tom Buggy is the Siskin Chair of Excellence in Early Childhood Education at UT-Chattanooga. Like Scott Bellini, he also focuses on video self-modeling with young people who have autism spectrum disorders. Dr. Buggy is the author of "Seeing is Believing: Video Self-Modeling for People with Autism and Other Developmental Disabilties", authored by Tom Buggey.

According to the description of the book, "VSM involves filming and editing footage to create a video of a person's ideal performance of a skill. The person then can watch whenever they please and gather valuable information about the skill. Seeing is Believing offers and step by step guide about how to get the equipment to begin the technique, how to plan the film, how to edit the video and much more."

Tom Buggey's "how-to" presentation about video self-monitoring can be downloaded at http://www.utc.edu/Faculty/Tom-Buggey/vsmorlandoclean.ppt

RELATED

If you are interested in free software that allows for detailed annotation of video, you might be interested in the Video Note Taker, which is free and open-source. It was developed by IBM researcher Eben Haber. I might give it a try.

In my job as a school psychologist, I use video to record some of my assessments, especially when I'm assessing students who have autism spectrum disorders. I also use it to develop video self-modeling activities and content for digital social stories. I find it to be useful when I conduct functional behavioral assessments. More recently, I have been using it to document student response to intervention, paying close attention to things that are difficult to record in real-time using traditional methods. What results is lots of video footage!

I think the Video Note Taker might help me with my work with young people who have suffered traumatic brain injuries.

I learned about the Video Note Taker from Harry Brignull's blog, "90 percent of everything". Harry is a User Experience Consultant. You can download the application from the SourceForge website.

Here is the description:

"The basic function is to allow the user to take notes while watching a computer video file. The program combines a video playback window and a very simple text editor. Keyboard shortcuts can control playback, e.g. pause/resume, skip back, etc."

This looks pretty cool, considering that video footage of assessments completed by a team, such as the ADOS, require a good deal of collaboration, and of course, rewinding, forwarding, and rewinding video! According to the software's author:

"This software has one other interesting feature: if two people at remote locations are watching the same video file, it can synchronize their players, so that if one person pauses the video, it pauses the other, and if one person skips ahead, the other player shows the same thing. This can be handy for going over a video with someone remote."

Links to papers presented at the CHI 2008 Workshop on Technology in Mental Health

A workshop on technology in mental health was held on April 6th at the 2008 CHI conference in Florence, Italy. The workshop participants covered a range of topics, including the use of technology with children who have autism spectrum disorders.

Several of the papers focused on how technology or digital media can support storytelling, an effective therapeutic tool. There is a need for technology-supported mental health interventions- I've read that In the US, up to four out five young people who have mental health problems have inadequate mental health care.

• Timothy Bickmore, Laura Pfeifer, "Relational Agents for Antipsychotic Medication Adherence". PDF

• Christine L. Lisetti, "Embodied Conversational Agents and Psychotherapy". PDF

• Julie A. Kientz, Rosa I. Arriaga, Gillian R. Hayes, Gregory D. Abowd, "Designing and Developing Technology for Caregivers of Individuals with Autism". PDF

• Joshua Hailpern, Karrie Karahalios, Laura DeThorne, James Halle, "Encouraging Speech and Vocalization in Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder". PDF

• Eileen Brosnan, John Sharry, Carol Fitzpatrick, "Using collaborative multimedia stories as a means of engaging adolescents in psychotherapy". PDF

• David Coyle, Gavin Doherty, "Designing Adaptable Technologies for Talk-Based Mental Health Interventions". PDF

• Connor Graham, Mark Rouncefield, "‘Reminders’ for design in mental health care". PDF

• Giuseppe Riva, Andrea Gaggioli, "Virtual Reality as Experiential Tool for Supporting Empowerment and Clinical Change". PDF

• M Alcañiz, R. Baños, J Guixeres, J Gomis Tena, J Saiz, "TIPS-Intelligent Sensory Platform for Clinical E-Therapy" PDF

• Marije Kanis, Mark Perry, Willem-Paul Brinkman, "Positive Expressive Technologies for Mental Wellness". PDF

• Mark Matthews, Gavin Doherty, John Sharry, "My Mobile Story: supporting content creation and analysis in mental health interventions". PDF

• Helen Minnis, Warren Read, Tanja Schumm, Suren Putter and Jonathan Green, "The Computerised Manchester Child Attachment Story Task: a novel medium for a measure of attachment patterns". PDF

• Marcela Musgrove, "Towards a More Inclusive and Ethical InterventionT". PDF

• Markus Wolf, Stephanie Bauer, Markus Moessner, Benjamin Zimmer and Hans Kordy, "Online delivery of mental health treatments – Approaches and future perspectives for research and practice". PDF

SymTrend: Use of a PDA for tracking progress for children and adults with Asperger Syndrome and other disorders

I'm always on the lookout for applications that can support intervention and progress monitoring. SymTrend is a company that provides coaching and monitoring software for a variety of social and emotional difficulties and disorders. SymTrend looks like it has potential for intervention and progress monitoring in schools for RTI (Response to Intervention), Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports, and IEP's.

The beauty of SymTrend, in my opinion, is that it helps people develop self-monitoring skills through providing a means of analyzing data that is gathered frequently. From what I understand, through interaction with the software, the student/client establishes a better understanding of themselves, and also and understanding of feelings, triggers, reactions, and coping strategies. A rich amount of data is collected that can be helpful to treatment providers, or special educators.

The following video from Minna Levine, Ph.D., president of SymTrend, explains how it can be used for young people who have Asperger syndrome:



Information I "reblogged" Dan Brickland, a SymTrend Advocate:

"SymTrend is an electronic diary system that is designed to optimize symptom and behavior reporting, progress tracking, and session to session progress. It combines tracking tools to see how things are going, with analytic tools for seeing what might subvert or retard treatment efficacy. It also contains guidance tools that can help make things go better. SymTrend is most useful when one or more of the following occur in a health or educational challenge:

• The course of change is slow and the indices of progress may be mixed or ambiguous.
• There is no single magic bullet solution or cure.
• There are, instead, multiple solution strategies that can be tried.
• The best combination of solution strategies depends on individual circumstances.
• The delivery of multiple services occurs at different sites and requires some coordination in time or over developmental stages.
• The road to success has hidden mine fields that impede progress, must be located, and that must be circumvented.
• The indices of progress - symptom reduction and skill building - are best measured at home or in the community not in an office.
• Progress indices change through out the day or from day to day in response to events.
• Verbal report is compromised by observational and memory failure.
• The verbal report takes longer than the service provider can give to listen.
• The person with the problem would benefit from on the spot "when to" reminders to improve progress.
• The person with the problem would benefit from how to reminders which enhance presence of mind and executive functioning reminders to improve progress."

-From "My Take on SymTrend"

If you are using SymTrend in the schools, clinical practice, or for research, please leave a comment!

Cross Post: Microsoft's SenseCam Improves Memory

From the Microsoft Research SenseCam Website:

"SenseCam is a wearable digital camera that is designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention, while it is being worn. Unlike a regular digital camera or a cameraphone, SenseCam does not have a viewfinder or a display that can be used to frame photos. Instead, it is fitted with a wide-angle (fish-eye) lens that maximizes its field-of-view. This ensures that nearly everything in the wearer’s view is captured by the camera, which is important because a regular wearable camera would likely produce many uninteresting images."

Technology Review Article

Images from Microsoft Research:

SenseCam Viewer

The SenseCam application has the potential to be a resource for people who have developmental delays, traumatic brain injury, severe attention deficits, and autism spectrum disorders. It would be a great tool for special educators, occupational and speech/language therapists, and rehabilitation specialists.