Diagnosing autism with ipad games.

A new study by the University of Strathclyde shows that autism could be diagnosed by allowing children to play games on smart phones and tablets. The study, published in the Nature group journal Scientific Reports, the research team outlined how the technology could offer an accessible and less intrusive way to diagnose the developmental disorder. Dr Jonathan Delafield-Butt, of Strathclyde's Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and colleagues used fun iPad games to track players' hand movements and gathered information that can help identify autism. Dr Delafield-Butt, a Senior Lecturer in Child Development, said: "We have shown that children with autism can be identified by their gameplay patterns on an iPad. "This is potentially a major breakthrough for early identification of autism, because no stressful and expensive tests by clinicians are needed. Early detection is important as this can allow parents and children to gain access to a range of services support. This new 'serious game' assessment offers a cheaper, faster, fun way of testing for autism. But more work is needed to confirm this finding, and to test for its limitations.In other words, it is not social, emotional, or cognitive aspects of the gameplay that identify autism. Rather, the key difference is in the way children with autism move their hands as they touch, swipe, and gesture with the iPad during the game. This finding adds new dimensions to a growing scientific understanding that movement is fundamentally disrupted in autism, and may underpin the disorder.In the study, researchers examined movement data gathered from 37 children with autism, aged three to six years. The children were asked to play games on smart tablet computers with touch-sensitive screens and embedded movement sensors. The result showed; analysis revealed these patterns consisted of greater forces at contact and with a different distribution of forces within a gesture, and gesture kinematics were faster and larger, with more distal use of space. These data support the notion that disruption to movement is a core feature of autism, and demonstrate autism can be computationally assessed by fun, smart device game-play.