At Little Friends, we spend most of our time working to help make the lives of those we serve, individuals with intellectual/developmental disabilities (I/DD) and autism, better. Something new we’re pleased to share with the community is a new venture with an organization from Canada by the name of Awake Labs.
This organization has developed new technology that helps monitor a person dealing with I/DD and autism and reports real-time changes in stress and strong emotions. Through this monitoring, it provides notifications to the care team during early stages of increased emotion. These notifications provide the care team the opportunity to provide support to the individual before their behavior becomes escalated.
This technology is new to the marketplace and up until now has only been used with adults. It involves a smartwatch, an app that runs on the cloud, and includes dashboard reporting to view objective data and trends to create individualized care.
What’s exciting is that Little Friends will be working with Awake Labs in 12-month pilot starting later this month that will track how these tools help children and adolescents.
The impact of this technology can be life changing for individuals and families who at times experience behaviors that can be challenging when an individual becomes dysregulated. If a care giver can get a signal that something might be happening given the technologies ability to read individual biomarkers signaling stress that otherwise might not be visible, all kinds of benefits can come from this new level of support.
As an organization, we are excited to be the pilot study for this new technology working with children. The potential impact if this does what we think will occur can help every family for years to come. Obviously, we will have more to share once we have the data from the work we will be doing.
