Can the iPad Unlock Autism’s Mysteries?
Gage Gilbert is a bright, 3 1/2-year-old boy with ocean blue eyes and golden blond hair. He loves reading books about science and enjoys singing songs with his Mom. His teacher says he’ll go to Harvard one day.
But right now, his parents’ biggest wish for him is to go to a regular kindergarten class. That’s because a year and a half ago, Gage was diagnosed with autism, a neurological disorder affecting 1 in 100 American children.
Gage is just one among a growing number of autistic kids. But as parents and researchers pursue the disorder’s ongoing mystery, his remarkable experience with the latest handheld technology may offer a fresh clue.
Imagine not being able to communicate with your child. Imagine feeling like he is trapped in “his own little world” — one that only he understands. This is how Gail and Gordon Gilbert felt when, at 2-years-old, their son Gage began to have a hard time keeping eye contact, had difficulty communicating, and showed significant delays in fine and gross motor skills.
More common than juvenile diabetes, pediatric AIDS, and childhood cancer combined, autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, is a range of complex neurodevelopment disorders. Children diagnosed with ASD often experience difficulty communicating and socializing with others, growing agitated if they aren’t able to adhere to a specific routine. Symptoms include a marked lack of eye contact, difficulty sharing feelings or empathy, and a tendency to repeat words or phrases, or obsess over specific routines.
For many parents of autistic children, the signs and symptoms that their children have autism go unrecognized. The Gilberts always noticed Gage’s poor eye contact. They even nicknamed him their “shifty-eyed little guy” — but thought it was because he liked looking around. Plus, their oldest son Griffin, 5, didn’t start speaking until he was two years old, so they weren’t concerned when Gage wasn’t reaching the same milestones.
Though some research suggests there may be a genetic link, what causes autism is still unknown, and there is no known cure. Understanding autism is key to coping with the disorder.
Luckily, the Gilberts live in Henderson, NV, in Clark County — one of the top three school districts in the U.S. for providing autism care and support.
Gage attends the KIDS program at Neil Twitchell Elementary, a unit of ECSE (Early Childhood Special Education). There, he gets support from trained autism therapists. In addition, the Gilberts were fortunate to find an aide that was willing to go to their home and provide Gage with applied behavioral analysis therapy (ABA) several times a week.
ABA therapy is an intensive teaching method that enables someone with autism to learn language, play, and social skills by influencing a response associated with a behavior. For example, a child with autism learns much less from the environment around them than a child without. They must learn how to do seemingly simple tasks like standing or sitting through associating the behavior with a response. ABA therapy uses a mixture of educational, behavioral, and psychological techniques to accomplish this.
For the Gilbert family, it was important for them to provide Gage with as many therapies and interventions as financially possible while also recognizing the importance of their other children’s needs. But the tool that had a dramatic, almost immediate impact on Gage came from an unexpected source: a cell phone.
As a Licensed Professional Counselor with a number of children/adolescents with autism on my caseload, this is exciting news. I frequently use the computer with a couple of programs to help the patient understand his world and to communicate his needs, I’ll be encouraging parents to get i-pads and will follow up on the research. Thanks for this welcome bit of information.
Another parent of an autistic child (5 years old) here — also having gone to a school that heavily uses ABA (Fred S. Keller school in Yonkers).
The big thing with iPhones/iPads is their intuitive interface. D has been playing with his Daddy’s iPhone since he was 3, and the responsiveness of most apps, and the multimedia aspect has been really engaging for him. One thing that can occur is a disconnect between body movements/outside world for autistic kids, and having a direct cause & effect like that can really help, not just in terms of regular verbal communication.
There’s all sorts of “balance”/fine movement games on the iPhone that can help the kids learn to hone their fine motor skills.
The funniest thing we’ve had happen is that we have a projector as our “TV” (just project onto a white wall), and we use Apple TV. So when D gets tired of Daddy screwing around in the menus, sometimes he’ll walk up to the wall, stick his hand on it, and slide it across the wall as if to change to a new screen. The first time he did it, he cracked us up. He doesn’t do it anymore, because he knows how to use the remote now. Dangit.
My wife and I are raising two grandchildren, the oldest a boy just turned twenty who is on the autistic spectrum, and is now in Nassau Community College, majoring in civil engineering. How he got there was a long and difficult journey. He must devote twice the time to his studies as a typical engineering student and he struggles with spoken communication. But his first semester grades were all A’s and B’s in 4 engineering and 1 pre-calculus class. The schools told us he belonged in the slower learning disabled class in second grade, but we knew he was very bright,but hadn’t learned yet to communicate. The battle is long,hard, and sometimes heart-breaking, with no guarantees of success at the end. Fortunately we have an extended family and have had many helpers along the way. Good luck to the Gilberts and the thousands of others in their circumstances.
I wish you and your grandson the best. I can relate, though, during the 60′s and 70′s no one knew how to diagnose ASDs. I was shuttled between dummy classes and smart kid classes. I have never been able to be successful in college, but I managed to teach myself software engineering were I make a pretty good living, but I make about half what my coworkers make mostly because of communication issues.
All of this focus on Autism has me very nervous. I feel that a major driving force behind it is not real concern for the individual, but an attempt to create yet another victim group that the left can subjugate along with gaining an understanding of the techniques that can be used to indoctrinate them. We autists are damn hard to indoctrinate. I should know as I am one and so are a large number of my friends.
Don’t worry, we know that the leftists would like nothing more than to exterminate us, so we’re wary of anything intended to “cure” us. This is also why I support a ban on prenatal testing for any diseases that cannot be treated in utero.
If it was up to the Left we would all have been killed in our mothers’ womb if we had the slightest defect–and they are the one who determine what a defect is–
This article reminds me how many very intelligent people throughout history have reported that their thought come to them “in pictures.” Two that come to mind are Albert Einstein and C.S. Lewis. When I was 12 years old I taught a child (later diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome) to play chess. All I knew at a time was that he was a kind, good kid but rather odd. After playing with him for about an hour I could not beat him any more and he was kicking my butt all over the board. I asked him how he figured those great moves he was playing and he said “I see them in pictures in my head.” That kid grew up to be a computer hardware engineer. His life has not been easy but he is brilliant in his field.
I wonder if that has something to do with the way autistic brains work.
That early experience helped me have a lot of respect for autistic children and the parents that love them.
what are the contaminants in high fructose corn syrup? the mass consumption food item introduced in recent decades.
heavy metals?
Many of those we recognize as the geniuses who brought humanity its most high-profile advances have a track record of being markedly deficient in social skills. If we were able to go back to their times and families, we would be quite likely to find them somewhere along the “functional” portion of the ASDS scale.
Edison was incapable of acceptable functioning in mainstream schools. Van Gogh was a brilliant artist . . . but how well did he function socially? Michelangelo or Galileo, anyone? Einstein was not noted for his navigational skills, but look at the knowledge he brought to humanity. (It’s certainly not his fault that some have abused that knowledge.)
In earlier times, lower-functioning ASDS children likely did not survive childhood. In more recent times, some governments have instituted policies to make sure they wouldn’t. (Heaven forbid that our nation doesn’t become one of those to adopt such policies . . . something we must diligently guard against.)
For a combination of reasons, some evident, others not so, we see or perceive a marked increase in the number of children diagnosable on the ASDS scale today. Can it be that when the survival of a society becomes a dicey proposition, our Creator “seeds” humanity with more ASDS children to bring forward the advances that will serve to get humanity through a particularly tough time?
Seems to me that we should take as given that these children and adults need every opportunity they can get, and if iPads represent one of those opportunities, then those of us who can should really make sure that iPads get placed in their hands. We also need to understand what’s happening there, and develop approaches to maximize the potential the iPad represents for those ASDS people who can benefit from their use.
The iPad is visual, tactile, and allows the children to learn for themselves,
as opposed to having to extract information from a ‘noisy communications channel’
connecting them to a teacher, while trying to ignore the ‘active jamming’ coming from
the rest of the class.
A ‘Heads Up’ (or out
for those who do not want to waste resources on the odder
Talented and Gifted students; Educating these children to their full potential, and
helping them become socialized so that they can and will contribute to society,
offers the highest ROI of any investment in our High-Tech future.
We are a student startup out of the University of Michigan, passionate about helping those with special needs by building innovative mobile apps. We currently have an app available as a free download in the iTunes App Store and Android Market called “Spubble” (speech + bubble). Spubble is an AAC app which allows the user to drag and drop specially designed icons into a speech bubble to build phrases. This is unique in that it helps those with special needs communicate, and it can be used as a learning tool.
We have been published in the media a number of times:
The Nassau Herald (on April 14th, 2011) – “Spubbling up help for autistic children”: http://www.liherald.com/fivetowns/fivetowns/stories/Spubbling-up-help-for-autistic-children,32130
The Ann Arbor Examiner (February 16th, 2011) – “Brilliant Spubble app does the talking for you”: http://www.examiner.com/gadgets-in-ann-arbor/brilliant-spubble-app-does-the-talking-for-you
“Like” us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MoBlueTech
Follow us non Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/MoBlueTech
Email us: MoBlueTechTeam@gmail.com
I am the parent of two severely autistic children. My son showed interest in playing “Tapfish” on my Verizon Android phone. As many autistic children need to be taught “hand over hand” (you place your hand over the child’s hand and make him pick up a pencil or whatever, which obviously gets more difficult at the child’s hand grows and gets bigger), the app only required “finger over finger” assistance. It also seems that my son likes (what I think is called the Haptic feedback) the little vibration you get as soon as you touch the icon on the screen. Just these two discoveries while using the “Tapfish” app seem to show promise.
Best way to unlock your IPad I have used is http://ipadunlock.weebly.com/
Best way to unlock your IPad I have used is http://ipadunlock.weebly.com/