Telemedicine

Autistic Children go to doctors an estimated 3 times more than normal children, and families travel hundreds of miles to see an autism specialist that takes months just to get an appointment. With Autistic children having difficulties with new environments and noisy crowded places. Children being able to be seen from their home or school are ideal for both child and doctor. Doctors receive a better view of the real child′s issues and behaviors while the child and parent does not go through needless stress just to see a doctor. The data obtained by the video also becomes part of the patient′s permanent medical record, which will help both parties see the changes from all appointments, and could be helpful with successful treatments being documented to help future patients.

This will allow the doctor a data collection of video clips (for example) to be part of the patient′s permanent record today, and perhaps auscultation graphs, otoscope images, and wireless EEG reports tomorrow.

Telemedicine has been proven in other medical applications to be more effective for treatment, less costly and better for facilitating select research. Princeton Autism Technology is gaining interest from organizations, doctors and families to explore telemedicine to better the lives of Autistic people and their families as described above.

Projects

A) Minolta and Healthcare Vision are supporting a pilot study to answer the following question: Could the following telemedicine service between families of people with autism and their health professionals be helpful?:

1. Caretakers video capture episodes using a Minota DiMage digital camera (allows still photos, recording of notes on camera, and audio/video capture). Episode is time-stamped and decision is made to send this for review.
2. The video capture could be mailed conventionally or electronically transferred to an involved health professional.
3. Health professional reviews either a) video on VCR or b) electronic video file on computer.
4. (for electronic file) Episode is archived for research or professional future reference.
5. See examples of at-home video capture of episodes using $250 digital camera by parents (for high speed connections only)
6. Come back to see one patient record being populated online... COMING SOON!