ONGKUR (Flower Blossom)

In Bangladesh,the service for autism is available only at the upper level of the pyramid.Besides being a very costly process, there are only a handful of professionals who are burdened to serve the ASD populace.

To incorporate the care for autism from the bottom of health service system,it’s not possible to increase the number of skilled health professionals overnight.So our application brings up a tech solution for this problem.

A system that enables the ASD populace to bring out their skills  via interactive modules,targeted training mechanisms,community supports & global reach-allowing them to be more included into our society.We want to fully engage their capabilities&make them a productive citizen capable of taking better care of themselves,thus they’ll never feel like a burden to their family & society.We don’t want any flower to wither away because they were never nurtured in the right way.Our system will improve their confidence, self- dependence&self-worth.

Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is an umbrella term,characterized by deficits in social communication, social interaction&the presence of restricted,repetitive patterns of behavior or activities. 

These people&the people in charge of taking care of them consistently have to face multiple severe problems :

• 31% of children with ASD have an intellectual disability with significant challenges in daily function, 25% are in the borderline range (IQ 71–85).Thus, ASDs may significantly limit the capacity of an individual to conduct daily activities&participate in society. It often negatively influence the person’s educational & social attainments as well as employment opportunities. 

• Most ASD affected individuals require life-long care & support that  costs an estimated 50lakh a year through childhood, with the bulk of the costs in special services & lost wages related to increased dem&s on one or both parents.. 

• They are often subject to stigma & discrimination, including unjust deprivation of health, education & opportunities to engage & participate in their communities.

• The health system in Bangladesh is pluralistic & most rural people have faith in traditional healers which act as barriers to proper management of mental disorders. Appropriate care is often missing both at district & sub-district health facilities due to lack of trained professionals

A significant portion of the able-bodied population of Bangladesh suffers from varying degrees of ASD.Their potentials&possibilities of development get stunted by the factors described in the previous section.Gradually they get marginalized from the active workforce&deprived of ever having a normal social life.There’s almost chance for them to have confidence in their skills&use their skills to support themselves in the long run, independently.We intend to accelerate the economic growth&empowerment among these alienated/excluded group

ONGKUR has been our student project for the past 8months.This project became the champion of the 2019-LICT SUST TechFest.Even in it’s infancy,ONGKUR received significant recognition from some of the prominent tech giants of Bangladesh.To progress it further&mature it,we've been visiting the local autism schools ever since.We’ve observed their inadequacies,talked about the problems faced by the care-givers, interacted with the students.We collaborated with our professors to design experiments measuring the affects of our prototype modules on both normal children&the ASD-affected children.It's currently an ongoing research project on which we’re constantly adding&improving.

Our project focuses on:

•  Identifying specific skills of the user,increasing productivity&efficiency by targeted training

•  Connecting with a community leading towards brighter possibilities

•   Introducing companion apps for the care-givers

•  Providing them with an economical platform of global reach

Features:

•  We are using Virtual reality technologies to render a 3d playful environment for the child, where he would feel in control of his environment & not feel threatened. A virtual companion would introduce him/her with the basics of social interaction & communication. The companion will prompt & remind the user to perform daily tasks to build up their self-dependence & confidence.

• Games & tasks related with image processing, audio processing, situation & emotion prediction etc based on the real world are introduced to familiarize them with their surrounding & improve their mental faculties. A mesh of Augmented reality, Virtual reality & smartphone functionalities  are used to create these modules. The progress in these tasks are stored in a central database which updates the caregivers.

• The app is developed in three phases for different levels of users. For advanced users we place them into real life situations via a community of volunteers & crowdsourcing, thus familiarizing them with social skills & slowly mitigating their sense of being threatened. This helps them to grow workplace capabilities as well. All of the above steps helps the user feel less excluded.

• We provide them with an economical platform which would help them invest their skills, showcase their works & find jobs to support themselves financially in the long run. Thus, they won't feel like a burden & be confident about their capabilities. They will be able to find economic stability.

• The system also includes a community platform where both the care-givers, parents & the ASD affected children can share & exp& their expertise, be updated about improvements in the field etc.

• Additionally using this project would help not only the affected children, but also all the others associated with them to adapt & thrive in the changing technologies , exp& their access to information technology & increase digital literacy among a broad group of people.

What we think sets this project apart is the amount of study that went into it. We gathered info from a huge bucket of tested researches before we started developing the mechanism for any of the modules. First and foremost, we emphasized on the fact that no autistic children is the same & each of them has specific strengths. The system first tries to identify these strengths through manual &/or dynamic approaches.The ASD-affected often get sensory-overloads & are easily distracted.The VR module helps them be in a peaceful learning environment,which encourages activities in a non-threatening way.The realism of the simulated environment allows the child to learn important skills,increasing the probability to transfer them into their everyday lives.As it’s easy for the ASD-affected to follow a routine, we provide a companion to remind them of their schedule.This companion, in return also works as shadow-teacher who can comfort the child during meltdown.The system is very visual, there are no abstract concepts,and long strings of words have been carefully avoided. The AR portion of the application, prompts the child to perform real life activities. These activities are in turns recorded and sent to the care-givers for manual calibration and alerts.We made sure there is no confrontation,rather a child is gradually desensitized to a situation.The app also provides a marketplace and career portal for advanced users.

We think the most innovative part of our system is, how we incorporated data with the smart technologies we had our hands on.

Currently we're experimentally using our system in a local Autism Training School, in a class of 20-25 children aged between 8 - 15years. By next year, we expect to serve at least a hundred users. By the next five years, we hope to expand to the most major cities of the country , targetting several thousand ASD-affected.

Currently we're experimenting the effectiveness of our modules on a group of 20-25 ASD-affected children under a supervisor. The research aims at finding more precise, effective methods to help the ASD-affected. We want to employ better algorithm to analyze our dataset, bringing more natural flexibility to our overall system. Our primary output from the user-group is substantially positive.

In a year, we plan to launch the pilot project to atleast 5-7 local Autism schools and run it for several months. After collecting and analyzing the output data we would decide on our future moves.

Within five years, we hope to effectively launch this system, in it's better version, in Autism schools all over the country serving several thousand users and their caregivers. For this we plan to use cheaper, more advanced equipment so the system can be used by users of all class. After this time period we expect the users to be technically equipped enough to join the larger economic force. We hope to expand a dedicated marketplace for them.

The main obstacles we have faced so far is the lack of proper equipments, therefore financial investments. We have also had to face more or less obstacles due the constraints on available human resource, while experimenting and gathering data for our modules.

In the coming days, we hope establishing communications with the authorities would be easier and data collection would be smoother. But financial lacking might persist as long as the system is in pilot.

We are working with our supervisors and professors in collecting and analyzing data without much hassle. We are also trying to gather funding to get the system through it's pilot phase, but so far it hasn't been fruitful.

For starters, better equipment could render more precise outputs for our experiments, and in turns better module designs. A dedicated developer team and research wing could potentially increase the overall dynamics of the project progress.  All of this depends largely on financial stability. So , currently we're trying to collaborate with different government and non-government organizations to manage funding. We are also working within our network to manage the human resource. The expansion on the described points depends on the amount of financial and intellectual support we receive.

Currently we have four team members, each in the 3rd year of their undergrad in Computer Science and Engineering

We have a balanced team of 4 members, consisting one female member-each with specific skillsets. Two of our members focus largely on the development on the project, one emphasizes on the inclusive UI designing and feedbacks, and one handles the overall problem analyzing,research,datacollection and feature designs.

We call ourselves the Team Nrick(a bangla word for solid). With the same team we have won this year's biggest hackathon of the country where we came out as champion competing with over 300 teams of the best minds in the technology field. Our project , which aims the root level health workers of BRAC can potentially revolutionize the efficiency of their entire existing system using seemingly easy and fresh techniques that utilized the nature of
human psychology and existing technologies like AR (Augmented Reality )
and QR.

Previously, the same team managed to be the champion in consecutive two more hackathons earlier this year - one in IUT and another in SUST.

Currently we're collaborating with the Health Sector of BRAC. We work both by being present in their office physically when it's required, but mostly do our works remotely.

The key beneficiaries of the business model would be the content-creators, the users and ofcourse the system developers. We intend to commercialize the contents, use online marketplace to bring economical sustenance to the advance users and produce customized version of the system to service different institution's needs and earn revenues.

We are thinking about new ways to keep a balance between profit and service, for a hybrid system with both profitable and non-profit contents.

• we intend to register a group of content makers who would create contents either for free or as a paid module. Users can buy these customized modules, creating a revenue source for the content creators and the system developers/
• The system can be customized per institution, through which we can earn revenues.
• The system includes a marketplace where the users can put up their created products to be sold. The marketplace can be another source of revenue earning for both the users and the system developers.

After much discussions we've boiled down our needs to the following:

• A structured workflow - so we're not distracted
• Strong mentors - to give us directions during complex situations
• Financial support - so the progress isn't suddenly stunted

Basically, we expect an economical and intellectual stability. TigerIT challenge offers us with that support, which is why we are working hard to take our project to the next level, to a grand scale.