A Mobile Health Application for Monitoring Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: ASD Monitoring by mHealth

Introduction

Autism Spectrum Disorder was first identified as the children's behavior (Kanner, 1968) by Kanner in 1943. Later it was recognized as children’s neurodevelopmental disorder which is also known as “Autism Spectrum Disorder” or “ASD.” Consistently, it creates a global problem, (Wallace et al., 2016), and people of all societal levels suffer from ASD (Organization, 2021). Now, Autism Spectrum Disorder is a heterogeneous disorder (Tariq et al., 2019), and all socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic groups in the world are impacted by autism.(Services, 2020; Therapy, 2021; Wallace et al., 2016) In 2020, worldwide, around one in 160 children had ASD (Elsabbagh et al., 2012; Organization, 2021), whereas, in the USA, the rate is one in 54. (A., 2020; DiGuiseppi et al., 2016; Maenner et al., 2020) Figure 1 shows the autism outbreak rate from 2004 to 2020 in the USA.(SARRC, 2021; Speaks, 2020) From the Figure 1, it can be seen that in the USA, in 2004, one ASD child was found on 166, whereas in 2020, this rate was one in 54. Currently, over 3.5 million people in the USA are taking autism diagnoses, and its cost is sometimes other one's lifespan. In 2015, in the USA, the diagnosis cost was $268 billion, and it is expected this cost will be reached to $461 billion by 2025.(Therapy, 2021) But it is a matter of regret that a family has ASD children mostly subject to stigma, discrimination, and human rights violation (Organization, 2021),46% of ASD children do not get the proper treatment even after identifying the ASD.(Happé et al., 2016) In developing countries, this scenario is worse, where they even know the “Autism Spectrum Disorder” term. (Therapy, 2021) Integrating the mHealth technology in this area can improve this situation and reduce the diagnosis cost. (Haque et al., 2020; Haque et al., 2021; Maples-Keller et al., 2017).

Figure 1.

Autism prevalence rate in the USA from 2004 to 2020 (SARRC, 2021; Speaks, 2020)

At present, mobile technology or mHealth is largely used in the early recognition or identification of the autism symbols or autism level in the children’s' early age. Many mobile or web-based apps (Barbaro & Halder, 2016; Chakrabarti, 2009; Crais et al., 2006; Eaves & Ho, 2004; Guthrie et al., 2013; Webb & Jones, 2009; Zwaigenbaum et al., 2015) are now available online, where both caregiver and care practitioner can take the mHealth advantages from these mobile apps. Also, some other self-reported autism development tracker apps are available to track the development of children with ASD. In this chapter, the authors propose a new and innovative mobile-based and primary caregiver-reported application, where the children's (with ASD) longitudinal behavioral and milestone parameters are being tracked and monitored remotely by the care practitioners. These longitudinal data will then be shown graphically to the care practitioners so that the children's development can be easily visualized to the clinical or care professionals or care practitioners. By this system, the caregivers or parents will regularly get the update their children's developmental level by the app's report.