SHARE-IT: School-Home Research Environment through Intelligent Technologies

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Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASCs) are neurodevelopmental conditions that affect an increasing number of individuals globally, and 1 child in 100 in the UK. Children with ASCs have marked difficulties in social interaction and communication skills and in performing tasks that require initiation of and responding to social actions, such as imitation, turn-taking and collaborative (joint) actions. Many children with ASCs go on to experience a life-time of unemployment and often severe mental health difficulties. There is no cure for ASCs. However, early intervention and consistent support that is also sustained over time and contexts is paramount to improving the child's ability to cope with social situations and, to enhancing their and their caregivers' quality of life, and outlook. Provision of consistent and sustainable support for children in and outside of school is advocated by the autism best practice community and by many schools with specialist provisions for ASC pupils. Modern interventions emphasise consistent support across contexts, and for teachers and parents to share the management of goals for each child through co-creation of learning experiences. Increasingly, teachers and parents look to technology as an effective complimentary intervention that, thanks to growing affordability and efficacy of mobile and cloud computing may provide the basic infrastructure for a continuous and sustainable link between the support given to children at home and at school.Recently there has been a massive growth in TEIs for Autism, but as with previous teaching-learning innovations, design and research have evolved in a sequential manner, with little direct influence on practice and limited research having been conducted in real-world classrooms. Maturing mobile and cloud computing make an open system for intervention creation and delivery in school and at home viable. Given the calls from the autism best practice community for such an open platform, they make it also necessary, relevant and timely. Artificial Intelligence techniques such as machine learning and gaze-tracking, which are increasingly embedded in everyday technologies, can transform such open platforms from places where ideas and experiences are exchanged, to places that can be co-created dynamically. The objective of SHARE-IT is to systematically investigate how different personal and mobile devices can be used individually and together to create a scalable intelligent learning environment for children with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASCs). The overarching aim is to facilitate continuity of support for children across school, home and other relevant contexts. SHARE-IT has two research questions: (Q1): Can the efficacy of autism interventions be optimized by using technology to interface across school, home and the child's existing therapeutic regime?; (Q2): How can such technological infrastructure be sustained over time through a combination of (i) continuous, voluntary input from teachers and parents and (ii) the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to the real-time tracking and logging of children's behaviours in naturalistic environments?The potential impact of SHARE-IT is significant as its findings, along with the research process itself, can affect many people in many contexts: teachers in how they deliver support to children at school; parents in how they help their children at home in a way that is consistent with school intervention and in how they cope with the significant demands of caring for a child with an ASC; children in being offered a tailored and on-demand support. Undertaking research in the wild under the EPSRC is crucial to achieving SHARE-IT's ambitions because this mechanism caters for both the engineering effort required and the crucial involvement of stakeholders in the process of creating technology that is relevant and useful to them.