Autistic Children: Sleep education helps families

Parent sleep education is beneficial in improving sleep and aspects of daytime behavior and family functioning in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), according to a Vanderbilt study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

Vanderbilt joined with the University of Colorado Denver and the University of Toronto to carry out a study of 80 children with ASD, ages 2-10 years, primarily focused on teaching parents the basics of sleep education.

Beth Malow

"We found that one hour of one-on-one sleep education or four hours of group sleep education delivered to parents, combined with two brief follow-up phone calls, improved sleep as well as anxiety, attention, repetitive behaviour and quality of life in children with ASD who had difficulty falling asleep," said study author Beth Malow, M.D., professor of Neurology and Pediatrics, and the Burry Professor of Cognitive Childhood Development.

"The parents also benefited; they reported a higher level of parenting competence after completing the education sessions. The one-on-one and group sessions showed similar levels of success. In contrast, an earlier study that simply gave parents a pamphlet without guidance on how to use it did not provide the same level of improvement in child sleep."

Before entering the study, all children were examined for medical conditions that could cause sleep problems, such as gastrointestinal disorders or seizures.

In the instructional sessions, parents learned about daytime and evening habits that promote sleep, including the importance of increasing exercise, limiting caffeine during the day and minimizing use of video games and computers close to bedtime.

Sleep educators helped parents put together a visual schedule for their children to help them establish a bedtime routine and discussed ways to help children get back to sleep if they woke up at night.

Malow, also a Vanderbilt Kennedy Center investigator, said future studies are needed to determine the best approaches for providing sleep education to families, including those related to telemedicine and Internet-based technologies.

Malow and her colleagues within the Autism Speaks Autism Treatment Network are also developing partnerships with local pediatric practices to provide training on sleep education.

Content from the sessions is available to download for free on the Autism Speaks website. A toolkit, "Strategies to Improve Sleep in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders," and three Quick Tips sheets are currently posted here.

"We are grateful to Autism Speaks for all of their support with our research and our toolkit materials. With their support, we have been able to help many children with ASD and their families get the rest they need to be at their best during the day," Malow said.

"We are also appreciative to all of the families who participated in this research."

Robotic therapy helps children's hand-eye coordination

Researchers from the University of Leeds are developing an innovative new robotic device that helps children to practise and improve their hand coordination.

Read the article on the Leeds University site.

The robotic arm uses haptic technology – meaning it applies forces, vibrations or motions to the user – to guide a child's hand as they play computer games designed to help writing.

The games the children play require them to practise hand and wrist movements commonly made during handwriting and other manual tasks.

As the child plays the games, the robot's arm helps them learn the correct movements by pushing and pulling the pen in the direction required to make the right moves.

The research has been led by Professor Mark Mon-Williams and Dr Liam Hill at the University of Leeds, in partnership with the Bradford Institute for Health Research and colleagues at the University of Indiana in the United States.

Mark Mon-Williams

Dr Hill said: "In trying to support a child with handwriting and coordination difficulties one of the major challenges teachers and occupational therapists come up against time and again is the limited time they have to work one-to-one with each child. In this respect haptic robotic technologies have huge potential efficiency benefits.

"They provide a means by which children can receive supported practise, at a level which adjusts to their growing abilities, without the need for one-to-one interaction with a therapist."

"Banks of these systems could be used simultaneously by multiple children in a clinic or in the classroom setting, under the supervision of a single overseeing professional."

The first United Kingdom pilot of the device has just been completed, demonstrating its feasibility for use in the classroom.

This was carried out with a small number of five- to seven-year-old children in Bradford with a wide range of manual abilities.

The researchers investigated their level of motivation and enjoyment whilst practicing for 20 minutes on a variety of robotic arm tasks presented previously in US-based studies using the system.

All the children found the tasks highly enjoyable and were able to perform them to an acceptable level.

Differences in performance between children previously identified by their classroom teachers as having handwriting difficulties were also noticeable.

Plans are now under way to run a larger intervention study within schools in Bradford that will formally investigate whether earlier research findings from the US can be replicated in younger schoolchildren in the UK.

Professor Mon-Williams and Dr Hill presented their findings at the British Psychological Society's Cognitive and Developmental Sections Joint Conference, in Reading.

Dyslexia: Audio-Letter game helps - Thesis

Dyslexia is a highly heritable neurobiological disorder defined as a persistent difficulty in learning to read. Phonological processing skills, associating letters to sounds, and word retrieval are deficient in many children with dyslexia. - Credit Lovio, Riikka

Poor reading accuracy and slow reading speed are, in turn, characteristic for adults with dyslexia.

Intact processing of even minor differences in speech sounds is essential for language development and reading skills. Speech perception requires sound discrimination and phoneme identification, despite the variation in their acoustical features.

Accurate phonological representations are also important for learning the connection between sounds and letters. Difficulties in auditory processing are common in individuals with dyslexia.

Cortical auditory processing can be investigated by recording the electroencephalography (EEG). The detection of changes in the regularities of the auditory input gives rise to neural activity in the brain that is seen as a mismatch negativity (MMN) response of the event-related potential (ERP) recorded by EEG.

As the recording of MMN requires neither a subject s behavioural response nor attention towards the sounds, it is suitable for studies of even young children.

Despite its advantages over behavioural measures, a major obstacle to the use of the MMN method has been the relatively long duration of its recording.

However, the multi-feature MMN paradigm with several types of sound changes was recently developed in order to obtain a comprehensive profile of auditory sensory memory and discrimination accuracy in a short recording time.

The present thesis investigated cortical multi-attribute auditory processing in dyslexia and the efficacy of intervention on reading-related skills and cortical speech sound discrimination.

Moreover, the feasibility of the multi-feature paradigm for dyslexia research, and studies in children was tested for the first time.

In this thesis, the multi-feature paradigm was found to be well suited for studies investigating central auditory processing in dyslexia and in children.

The results showed that cortical auditory processing is aberrant in dyslexia.

In children at risk for dyslexia, auditory processing seems to be deficient even at the initial phase of sound encoding.

Furthermore, these children also showed a widespread pattern of abnormal cortical auditory discrimination processes.

Adults with dyslexia, in turn, have difficulties in discriminating sound frequency and duration features in a complex auditory environment.

Early intervention can influence the developmental path of dyslexia, however.

The results of this thesis show that even a short intervention with audio-visual letter-sound exercises improves children s reading-related skills and cortical discrimination of vowel contrasts.

More Information:
Cortical multi-attribute auditory discrimination deficits and their amelioration in dyslexia - Lovio, Riikka

Cerebral Palsy: Botox helps boy take his first steps

Brave toddler Aiden Farrell has taken his first steps after having injections of the anti-ageing cosmetic drug botox in his legs.

Aiden, three, was born with crippling cerebral palsy and his muscles tightened up so much so he was unable to straighten his legs without feeling terrible pain.

The toddler’s parents Sara and Gevun scoured the internet for treatment and discovered that Botox injections had been used to relieve symptoms before presenting the idea to UK NHS medical management.

Botox injections work by unblocking nerve impulses which restrict his movement - the same way celebrities use it to combat the effects of ageing.

Mother-of-four Sara, 31, from Gosport, Hampshire, said: 'Seeing Aiden take his first steps is something I never dreamed would be possible.

'I noticed as soon as we got home after having the treatment the difference was amazing. 'Usually he would sit on the sofa with his legs bent up but his legs were normal, like ours would be when we sit on the sofa.

'It may sound unusual but if it helps my little boy walk I do not care. It´s about trying to build up strength in his legs and walking more. He is using muscles he has never used before.´

'The difference in mobility is unbelievable.' Aiden has suffered health problems all his young life after being born prematurely at 29 weeks, weighing just 3lb and kept alive on a ventilator.´

Sara added: 'When I was told Aiden had cerebral palsy we grieved every day, especially because we have other children and could see them running around the house.

'It was difficult because we wanted Aiden to do the same things they could do.

'Over time his legs tightened up so much he was unable to straighten them. He would cry with any physiotherapy exercises he was given to strengthen his legs.

'I felt useless because all I could do was massage them to make his pain go away.”

After reading about the treatment online, Aiden was placed on an 18-month waiting list and in December last year was given 12 injections, two in each of his calves, hamstrings and groin.

The family were told there was only a 50 per cent chance of it being successful.

Autism: 'Gordon,' a supercomputer with unique flash memory

Gordon, a completely new kind of supercomputer that uses massive amounts of flash memory, helps researchers study transcription factors that can be targeted for treatment of mental disorders. 

Credit: UC San Diego Publications/Erik Jepsen 

When it officially came online at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in early January 2012, Gordon was instantly impressive. In one demonstration, it sustained more than 35 million input/output operations per second—then, a world record.

Input/output operations are an important measure for data intensive computing, indicating the ability of a storage system to quickly communicate between an information processing system, such as a computer, and the outside world. Input/output operations specify how fast a system can retrieve randomly organized data common in large datasets and process it through data mining applications.

The supercomputer's record-breaking feat wasn't a surprise; after all, Gordon is named after a comic strip superhero, Flash Gordon. Gordon's new and unique architecture employs massive amounts of the type of flash memory common in cell phones and laptops—hence its name.

The system is used by scientists whose research requires the mining, searching and/or creating of large databases for immediate or later use, including mapping genomes for applications in personalized medicine and examining computer automation of stock trading by investment firms on Wall Street.

"Gordon is a unique machine in NSF's Advanced Cyberinfrastructure/XSEDE portfolio," said Barry Schneider, NSF program director for advanced cyberinfrastructure.

"It was designed to handle scientific problems involving the manipulation of very large data. It is differentiated from most other resources we support in having a large solid-state memory, 4 GB per core, and the capability of simulating a very large shared memory system with software."

Last month, a team of researchers from SDSC, the United States and the Institute Pasteur in France reported in the journal Genes, Brain and Behaviour that they used Gordon to devise a novel way to describe a time-dependent gene-expression process in the brain that can be used to guide the development of treatments for mental disorders such as autism-spectrum disorders and schizophrenia.

Reference: 
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1601-183X

Read more at: www.sdsc.edu/supercomputing/gordon/

Autism: Humanoid Robot Helps Train Autistic Children

Aiden, who has been diagnosed with ASD, and NAO, the humanoid robot who can help him. 

Credit: Joe Howell / Vanderbilt

"Aiden, look!" piped NAO, a two-foot tall humanoid robot, as it pointed to a flat-panel display on a far wall.

As the cartoon dog Scooby Doo flashed on the screen, Aiden, a young boy with an unruly thatch of straw-coloured hair, looked in the direction the robot was pointing.

Aiden, who is three and a half years old, has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

NAO (pronounced "now") is the diminutive "front man" for an elaborate system of cameras, sensors and computers designed specifically to help children like Aiden learn how to coordinate their attention with other people and objects in their environment.

This basic social skill is called joint attention. Typically developing children learn it naturally.

Children with autism, however, have difficulty mastering it and that inability can compound into a variety of learning difficulties as they age.

An interdisciplinary team of mechanical engineers and autism experts at Vanderbilt University have developed the system and used it to demonstrate that robotic systems may be powerful tools for enhancing the basic social learning skills of children with ASD.

Writing in the March issue of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, the researchers report that children with ASD paid more attention to the robot and followed its instructions almost as well as they did those of a human therapist in standard exercises used to develop joint attention skill.

The finding indicates that robots could play a crucial role in responding to the "public health emergency" that has been created by the rapid growth in the number of children being diagnosed with ASD.

Today, one in 88 children (one in 54 boys) are being diagnosed with ASD.

That is a 78 percent increase in just four years. The trend has major implications for the nation's healthcare budget because estimates of the lifetime cost of treating ASD patients ranges from four to six times greater than for patients without autism.

"This is the first real world test of whether intelligent adaptive systems can make an impact on autism," said team member Zachary Warren, who directs the Treatment and Research Institute for Autism Spectrum Disorders (TRIAD) at Vanderbilt's Kennedy Center.

The initial impetus for the project came from Vanderbilt Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Engineering Nilanjan Sarkar. His original research involved the development of systems to improve the man-machine interface.

He did so by outfitting computer/robot users with biosensors and analyzing variations in various readings like blood pressure and skin response to evaluate their emotional state.

The information was used to program computers and robots to respond accordingly.

Six years ago, when visiting his cousin in India, Sarkar learned that his cousin's son had been diagnosed with ASD.

"After I learned something about autism, it occurred to me that my research could be valuable for treating ASD," he said.

At the time, several experiments had been conducted that suggested young children in general, and young children with ASD in particular, found robots especially appealing.

"We knew that this gave us an advantage, but we had to figure out how to leverage it to improve the children's social skills," Sarkar said.

"You can't just drop a robot down in front of a child and expect it to work," added Warren. "You must develop a sophisticated adaptive structure around the robot before it will work."

To develop this structure, which they named ARIA (Adaptive Robot-Mediated Intervention Architecture), Sarkar and Warren assembled a specialist team.

The team decided that a robotic system had the greatest potential working with young children. "Research has shown that early intervention, individualized to the learner's needs, is currently the most effective approach for helping children with autism develop the foundational social communication skills they need to become productive adults," Crittendon said.

So the researchers built an "intelligent environment" around NAO, a commercial humanoid robot made in France, whose control architecture was augmented for the purpose.

The small robot stands on a table at the front of the room. Flat panel displays are attached to the side walls.

The chair where the child sits faces the front of the room and is high enough to put the robot at eye level. The room is equipped with a number of inexpensive web cameras that are aimed at the chair.

Their purpose is to track the child's head movements, so the system can determine where he or she is looking.

To aid in this effort, children in the study wore a baseball cap decorated with a strip of LED lights that allowed the computer to infer where they are looking.

NAO has been programmed with a series of verbal prompts, such as "look over here" and "let's do some more," and gestures such as looking and pointing at one of the displays, that imitate the prompts and gestures that human therapists use in joint attention training.

The protocol begins with a verbal prompt that asks the child to look at an image or video displayed on one of the screens.

If the child doesn't respond, then the therapist provides increasing support by combining a verbal prompt with physical gestures such as turning her head or pointing.

When the child looks at the target then the therapist responds with praise, such as telling the child, "good job."

The setup allowed the researchers to test the relative effectiveness of the robot-based system and human therapists in joint attention training with a dozen 2- to 5-year-old children, six with ASD and a control group of six typically developing children.

They alternated short human-led and robot-led training sessions and compared how the children performed.

The test found that the children in both groups spent more time looking at the robot than they spent looking at the human therapist.

During the human-led sessions, the children in the control group spent significantly more time watching the therapist than the children with ASD did.

In the robot-led sessions, however, both groups spent about the same amount of time looking at the robot.

"The children's engagement with the robot was excellent," Crittendon said, "and we saw improvements across the board in both groups."

One of the key elements of ARIA is its closed loop design. The robot adapts its behavior to each child automatically depending on how he or she is responding.

"There is a saying in the field, 'If you've seen one child with ASD, you've seen one child with ASD.' So one size does not fit all. To be useful, the system must be adaptive," Warren said.

The cost of robotic systems like this will continue to come down in the future so it should easily pay for itself by supplementing human intervention.

"In addition, ARIA is not designed to replace human therapists, who are in short supply, but to leverage their efforts.

"A therapist does many things that robots can't do," said Sarkar. "But a robot-centered system could provide much of the repeated practice that is essential to learning.

The cost of robotic systems like this will continue to come down in the future so it should easily pay for itself by supplementing human intervention."

Warren hopes that robotic systems can act as an "accelerant technology" that actually increases the rate at which children with ASD learn the social skills that they need.

Encouraged by the success of this current study, Sarkar and Warren have started developing robot-mediated autism intervention systems that will address other deficits of children with autism such as imitation learning, role playing and sharing.

Dyslexia: Music Ability Helps Reading

Playing a musical instrument from a young age appears to create new pathways in the brain that process written words and letters, reports Ann Lukits in the Wall Street Journal.

The findings, which may help children with reading disorders such as dyslexia, appeared in the journal Neuropsychologia.

“Fifteen professional musicians who had played an instrument since childhood and 15 control subjects who couldn’t read music participated in two experiments in Milan. Subjects were 26 to 31 years old.

In one experiment, subjects pressed a button if they recognized the notes E, F, G, A and B (mi, fa, sol, la and ti on the musical scale) which randomly appeared in 300 short musical scores flashed on a computer screen.

In the other experiment, they pressed the button when they spotted the letters B, G, L, M and S in 300 randomly selected words. An electroencephalogram (EEG) measured brain-wave activity. Musicians recognized notes significantly faster than controls; letters, only slightly faster. Musicians made fewer errors in both experiments.

But EEG results showed striking differences. In musicians, reading musical notes and words activated both the left and right sides of the brain, whereas in controls, only the left side responded to words and the right side to notes.

Language is normally a left-brain function and music a right-brain function. The involvement of the right side in a typically left-sided function probably resulted from reading music, researchers said. Musical training may be quite helpful for children struggling to read, they said.”

Read more here

Young Czech Artist Helps Dyslexic Children

Click on the picture to visit the website

Inspiration 9 Software: Helps Note taking for Students

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