AUTISMIND

Ontwikkeling van een theorie van de geest en sociaal denken met autisme, Asperger of ADHD kinderen

Autismind is therapists, parents and other professionals' tool to work and improve Theory of Mind in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (Autism, Asperger, or symptoms related to ASD).

Autistic kids usually have a lack of social thinking and Theory of Mind, the ability to infer mental states in others and adapt our behavior accordingly, so it's hard for them to get in others mind to know what are they thinking, feeling or what do they want. That's why social interaction can be difficult and they can have problems to get integrated in the context.

Autismind is a structured app with 10 different subjects, divided in 6 difficulty levels, with more than 1000 exercises to work the mental skills needed to develop the Theory of Mind. It requires the parent or professional implication to work with the kid, despite it's done with some interesting and motivating characteristics:

Very easy and intuitive to navigate throw without help and it's very simple and clear.

Feedback and positive reinforcement: the kid knows every time if the answer it's correct and there are verbal and visual rewards to make it more interesting. The kid is able to choose between 5 possible rewards and the prize gets better as more exercises are completed.

Adaptable settings: autismind allows the adult to personalize some options to adjust different items: progress bar, sounds, music, reward, etc. Very important when working with children with autism.

Learning without mistakes: there is help provided when the kid answers wrong, so frustration is avoided (a very common problem when autistic children get stucked) and the kid is able to learn something new. In addition, after some practice but before increasing the difficulty, the wrong exercises are presented again without the help provided.

Exportable data: automatically all the data it's registered and can be consulted in the statistics menu, knowing the answer time response, the total amount of time the kids spends in every level or the total mistakes he has done.

Draws and photos: it usually begins with very simples draws, easier to understand for autistic kids, but it also works with real photos, with more details and information to process, but more realistic to promote the generalization.

AutisMIND it has been developed by a team of psychologists, speech therapists, teachers and doctors from IDAPP, an autism therapy center in Barcelona, Spain, but also done with the collaboration of the families and patients, without whom, it would have been impossible to have AutisMIND.