Deakin University

HEALTH

 launches TOBY Playpad App for Children with Autism

Dec 21, 2012

By Prashant Kapadia

Deakin  University, one of the leading  Australian  universities today launched TOBY Playpad ( Therapy Outcomesby You), an early intervention application for children with Autism.TOBY Playpad monitors child’s performance on tasks from a complex  syllabus and adjusts lesson delivery to each and every child. The  application aims to empower parents to start early intervention to  maximize child’s development.

TOBY offers diverse tasks  drawn from a curriculum based on the kid’s progress with  pre-requisite tasks. The curriculum has a very dynamic approach; itis able to adapt child’s learning and developmental needs by  choosing goals and adjusting the difficulty of tasks. Based on TOBY’s   recommendations one needs to choose the tasks to complete each dayand based on the child’s results, TOBY further generates  suggestions for the following day’s activities.

TOBY’s intensive  curriculum covers social skills, language, sensory discrimination and   cognitive skills. This unique therapist-designed early intervention   curriculum includes 20 minutes of iPad time and similar amount of   time off the iPad. These tasks are weaved into the parent’s daily  routines and child’s play interests. Parents can track their  child’s progress, as TOBY generates easy to read reports through  curriculum tree and suggests how much support, or prompting, they  need. This also helps parents, therapists and educators to identify    the problems which might be occurring and later design strategies to  help them.

During  the launch of TOBY app, Svetha  Venkatesh, Professor of Computer Science and Director, Pattern   Recognition and Data Analytics (PRaDA) at Deakin University, Australia,  said, “The TOBY Playpad is an opportunity for parents and educators  to provide their children early intervention therapy as soon as  autism spectrum disorder has been diagnosed. This technology has been  carefully designed for parents and educators in collaboration with  Autism West Support Inc (a Western Australian Autism support charity)  which is cost effective and easy to use program with children at  home.”

“There are 1.36 million  autism patients in India at present and many of the families are noteven aware of this disability. We see an acute need to provide early  intervention therapy to many autistic children and develop their  learning ability. For a population where, autism as disability  generally gets unnoticed, we want to create and build awareness to  reach out to as many people as possible. To promote the usage of TOBY  Playpad, we have partnered with The National Trust and the Business  and Community Foundation, who are already working in this field.”

The TOBY Playpad is  available through the Apple iTunes Store and is currently targeted at   children aged two to six years old.The launch of the TOBYplay pad is a part of Deakin’s ongoing efforts to engage locally  and provide solutions to community based issues through cutting-edge research.