Brain in Hand: Scaling Support for Autistic Adults to enable independence

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There are around 1,000,000 autistic people in the UK. They will have poorer health outcomes than their neurotypical peers: shorter life expectancy, more likely to die from suicide and to live with other conditions, such as anxiety disorders. They will also be unlikely to get paid work. Well targeted support offered across the life course could reduce inequalities, enable greater independence and improve productivity, and in turn enable the autistic community to live well longer.Health and social care services are however under the dual pressure of high levels of vacancies and staff sickness, and increased demand for support, especially for mental health support. They have no capacity to embrace innovation and no incentive to shift to a more preventative approach. It is unlikely in the short or medium term that more support will be available to autistic people.In this project we will take a proven support system, Brain in Hand (BIH), currently available to fewer than 1% of autistic people and transform its scalability to make it available to tens of thousands of people initially in the UK and internationally in the longer term.Brain in Hand is a combination of simple digital tools and practical human support, designed to help develop self-management skills and independence, which in turn addresses the barriers that lead to poor outcomes. Although the product works well at a modest scale, early reconnaissance with users and commissioners have highlighted the barriers to operating at scale. These are addressed through five packages of work:* Assessing the needs of autistic people to inform product development* Adding intelligent functionality* Building the capacity of the business to support large numbers of users* Demonstrating impact for older adults and value for money to funders* Determining potential new markets and developing plans for accessing themBrain in Hand's novel system enables autistic people to be in control of their own strategies and self-management - it turns traditional support on its head: user led; available when wanted; accessible 24/7/365\. The Brain in Hand system also contributes to ease-of-access for these services as it is available through any smartphone and computer interface and requires minimal data usage, thereby removing traditional barriers to care.Brain in Hand plans to launch internationally post-UK scaling providing access and support to 25,000 users annually by 2025 - increasing independence and enabling healthy ageing.