SBIR-STTR Award

We will develop and evaluate a tool designed to support the collection of rich data for performing a Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) in schools to support the development of intervention plans for children with special needs, specifically children with autism (CWA). The proposed archiving system will permit educators to record only those data or behaviors judged to be important for later retrieval and review. The "experience buffers" described provide an alternative for recording that is a trade-off between cryptic note-taking that may not capture critical information and 100% recording that is time-consuming because of the need to review a mass of information to locate the required critical data. In phase I, we will modify our preliminary system for use in a school environment with the aid of advice from focus groups, explore the potential privacy/legal hurdles, assess feasibility in a small pilot study, and verify the results. In phase II, we will evaluate the system in a more rigorous manner, applying it to the study of a large CWA population and comparing outcomes using a more traditional method of record-keeping. The commercial potential of our system is high given the large and increasing incidence of autism that is treated both in the home and in school environments. Beyond that, successful demonstration in the CWA population should make this system attractive in other applications that depend on in-depth analysis by educators.

Thesaurus Terms:
autism, behavior prediction, child behavior disorder, computer assisted diagnosis, diagnosis design /evaluation, mental disorder diagnosis, remedial /special education, technology /technique development, video recording system child mental disorder, confidentiality, educational psychology, health economics, school, teacher adolescence (12-20), adult human (21+), behavioral /social science research tag, clinical research, focus group, human subject, middle childhood (6-11)

We will develop and evaluate a tool designed to support the collection of rich data for performing a Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) in schools focusing specifically on children with autism. The proposed archiving system will permit educators to record only those data or behaviors judged to be important for later retrieval and review. The "experience buffers" described provide an alternative for recording that allows educators to get critically needed records without the tedious tasks of manually documenting all of the details and without 100% video recording. In phase I, we modified our preliminary system for use in a school environment with the aid of advice from focus groups, identified the potential privacy/legal hurdles, and assessed feasibility in a small pilot study. Each of these specific aims was met. In phase II, we will evaluate the system in a more rigorous manner, applying it to the study of a larger population of children with special needs, engaging 3 centers in the study to demonstrate universality and quantifying outcomes over a period of approximately one year. We will conduct studies to evaluate further the necessary training and background for instructors to use our system appropriately. The commercial potential of our system is high given the large and increasing incidence of children with special needs treated in school environments. Health benefits include capability for caregivers to access behaviors in a real school environment that should lead to improved behavior modification. Cost benefits include reduced time for caregivers to review behaviors of interest. We will develop and evaluate an archiving system to permit educators and caregivers to record only those behaviors judged to be important for later retrieval and review. The "experience buffers" described provide an alternative for presenting behaviors of children with autism in their usual school environment. Health benefits include improved behavior modification based upon capability for accessing behaviors in a real school environment for immediate or later review. Cost benefits include reduced time for caregivers to review behaviors of interest.

Public Health Relevance:
This Public Health Relevance is not available.

Thesaurus Terms:
Behavior Disorder, Children, School Archive, Autism, Base, Behavior, Behavior Modification, Behavior Test, Buffer, Caregiver, Child Behavior, Concept, Conditioning, Data Collection, Diagnosis, Element, Environment, Experience, Focus Group, Health, Human, Lead, Learning, Literature Survey, Motivation, Sectioning, Solution, Teacher, Technology /Technique Development, Training, Training Level Clinical Research