A holistic app specializing in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism BASICS App

Being a parent or a caregiver of an individual who falls in the spectrum, you would know that every child with Autism defines it differently. So, just as the symptoms and behaviours vary widely, the intervention and treatment for Autism also varies. Early intervention is essential, especially for the children who are at the age of preschool and below. Currently, the treatment for Autism focuses mainly on reducing the symptoms that affect their daily functioning. Different kinds of therapies are offered according to the needs of the child, targeting to improve the quality of their life.

Autism BASICS: Best kids educational app

What are Autism therapies?

Autism therapies are the support practices aimed at reducing the unwanted behaviors and improving the skills and abilities of the autistic children. During Autism therapies, the areas such as communication, social skills, self-care, ADLs (Activities of daily living), motor challenges and so on are worked on. These therapy plans are made by the concerned therapists according to the needs of the individual child.

The therapies include

• Behaviour therapy (ABA therapy)
• Speech therapy
• Occupational therapy
• Special education therapy
• Social skills therapy
• Early intervention therapy
• School readiness skills therapy

So depending upon the issues a child is facing, therapy plans are custom-tailored according to the needs of that child. Though the issue seem like something else, the underlying reason could be the other, which can be understood by an experienced therapist.

Introduction of technology into therapies

Therapies are basically focused on making things easier for the child, by breaking the patterns slowly and upgrading their daily living to near normalcy. Introducing techniques to help children with special needs is the primary step in therapies. Understanding the child’s needs, preparing therapy plans accordingly and using various techniques to implement them constitutes the whole therapy process.

Use of technology in therapies

For instance, using pictures to depict things as a part of communication, comes under Augmentative and alternative communication technique. This method can be used to practice pronunciation of the words by pointing various things to a child. Giving constant auditory prompting by showing a picture or the object itself can help the child to try pronouncing it. This technique is used in speech and language therapy. Likewise, various kinds of materials are introduced for tactile stimulation by making the child walk on different textures of mats. This is a method for tactile prompting to reduce the touch sensitivity.

The Seven Senses

Along with the commonly recognized five senses visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory, we have two other senses that work in coordination. They are vestibular and proprioceptive senses. These senses impact balance, motor skills, and body awareness. Disturbances and imbalances in these senses cause irritations, tantrums, and attention issues, rigid and repetitive behaviors in children. Hence they need therapeutic support.

In order to meet the child’s needs and to assist you all the way, our team of experts have developed an interesting app, the Autism basics. Our experienced speech and language therapists, behaviour therapists, and special educators have worked well to provide a wide range of aspects that are necessary for the child’s development. Here are the details of our app.

What is Autism Basics App?

Autism Basics app is a holistic fun learning early-intervention app for children with Autism and other special needs. It not only helps Autistic kids but is also useful for neuro-typical kids at an early age. This app makes learning easy by adapting to the child’s capabilities.

Autism Basics: A holistic early childhood development app

Autism Basics app focuses to work on the issues of your child in a coherent way while measuring their learning simultaneously. With this, learning becomes a daily habit. It adapts to provide the child with exercises of increasing difficulty if the child is being able to crack them. Many interesting and important concepts such as good manners, habits, and social skills are also introduced to the child.

Autism Basics app aims at the following concerns:

• Behaviour
• Academics
• Sensory integration
• Independent living skills
• Communication
• Social skills

Salient features of Autism Basics App:

• Uses Peer-modelling which makes the videos interactive for the kids.
• Has a slow-speed feature to make the pronunciation easy while learning words.
• Parental hub section to provide guidance to the parents
• A handy assessment tool that helps parents to understand if the kid has Autism
• The real-life pictures shown for different objects enables the child’s abstract thought to develop into a concrete one.
• 8000+ practice exercises to make learning, the daily habit
• Increasing level of difficulty in exercises enabling the child to try more
• Parental screen-time control to avoid addiction
• Feasibility for caregivers or parents to plan the activities of child
• Many suggestions for the parents in attending to child’s needs
• Many sections to introduce important concepts and adding more soon

What if the child develops Screen addiction?

Being a parent or caregiver, it is a common question that you would have. But high quality apps can help children develop their decision making skills, lessen their speech issues, improve social communication, and motivation to learn.

Autism Basics app is such an engaging app but the screen time can be controlled by the parent. In case, you wish to increase the time, we have provided the simple 5-minute increments. Hence, the parent can act as a controller to avoid screen addiction.

Besides, the concept of ABA (Applied Behaviour Analysis) therapy is used in designing the exercises, which enables the children to have rewarding appreciations only when they answer correctly. For this to happen, the child must have some attention levels. Even if this starts from a short span, with daily exercises and making learning a habit, the attention span increases sooner.

Thus learning can happen without your child getting addicted!

What does Autism Basics App offer?

Autism Basics is a holistic learning application designed for children with an added interest on special needs. This app basically focuses on fundamental aspects such as behaviours, academics, sensory integration, independent living skills, communication and social skills. Autism Basics app has been carefully crafted with suitable lessons and practice exercises that work in tandem. This helps the introduction of concepts in a lucid and indulging way, while gauging their learning process through exercises, giving a scope to analyze the child’s progress. The practice exercises are arranged in an increasing level of difficulty, to create interest in kids. These lessons contain all the basic and elementary concepts such as from alphabets and spellings to word pronunciations, from pre-math and basic math problems to simple exercises, from good manners and habits to all the necessary primary concepts. Around eight thousand plus exercises and more than fifteen categories are designed to foster fun learning among kids. Many such interesting categories are in the pipeline and will be added each month to the existing library.

In order to strengthen the learning, we have introduced daily practice exercises. The parents can choose from categories of lessons across the board and assign an exercise to the child every day. Doing them daily can develop a habit of revision. If the child is not comfortable, the parent can change the level of difficulty or the category anytime, accordingly. The activity time has been set to an incremental option of five minutes, which the parent can assign based on the child’s engagement capacity. We are also under the process of making another app named Expert Basics, which enables professional autism and speech experts to assign daily activities along with the parents. Having an idea of the kid’s strengths and weaknesses across all the listed categories, they can plan the exercises for overall development.

Our peer-modelling videos contain an option to slow down the speed of the pronunciation, too. This enables the child to form a familiar connection with the words. Then as the child tries to imitate the pronunciation of the word, just as the real model child, app’s speech recognition feature provides the feedback. Important life lessons with engaging points of good manners and daily habits are displayed as a slideshow.

Wellness hub extends its caring also to the caregiver, unlike other learning apps. We offer plenty of resources for the caregivers and parents that help them to understand the child’s needs and situation. The parental hub section addresses most myths and answers the frequently asked questions (FAQs) by parents of children with Autism and special needs. It also contains certain assessments to understand if the child has Autism or not, and if it is present, the next steps are suggested. For a better understanding of the parent, various milestones achieved by the children of different age groups is also provided in this section. We intend to cover all the necessary aspects that a parent should be aware of. It helps the caregivers or parents to be well-equipped with knowledge on what can be done for their child’s progress and welfare.

Besides all this, Wellness hub always welcomes any suggestions from parents and well-wishers to extend better services, round the clock.