AUesome

AUesome is a social enterprise with the mission of bridging the digital and physical world of at-home therapy for children on the autism spectrum, one kit at a time.

AUesome’s goal is to make therapy more accessible and affordable for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder globally. In the United States alone, 1 in 44 children are on the autism spectrum per the CDC’s statistics. Despite this, 50 percent of children with severe autism only have access to school-based treatment services, and as a whole, 17 percent of children with autism do not have access to occupational, speech, behavior, or language therapy whatsoever. Existing therapies for neurodivergent children in clinics, like Applied Behavioral Analysis, a controversial practice, and Occupational Therapy, are expensive and geographically isolating in limited locations, costing more than 100 dollars per hour. These existing profit-driven systems reveal that current services for children with autism are centered around treatment, but few services on the market are aimed at eliminating the barriers to receiving treatment, to begin with. 

From a global standpoint, over 1 percent of the population has autism spectrum disorder (that’s 75,000,000 million people!), with accessibility varying based on regional and legal standards. Through personal experiences highlighted in future sections, our team has frequently found that the inaccessibility presented in the United States is far greater in countries that do not have special needs support programs, let alone public educational infrastructure. This is brought out further by cultural and societal norms, which frequently underrepresent disability. Oftentimes, reported data is limited in its scope to cover per-nation statistics, let alone encompass all neurodiverse individuals, as over a quarter of children with autism go undiagnosed, according to Science Daily. To put representation into context, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act were only passed in 1990. In India, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act was passed in 2016. And, despite the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD) being signed in 2008, many nations like Greece lack significant legislation to aid individuals with disabilities. These examples all serve to embody the relevance, significance, and importance of special education which has been, and is, undermined by public authorities worldwide.

Moreover, a lack of parental involvement in the form of Parent-Implemented Interventions (PII) leads to less continuation, or progression, of therapy in an at-home setting. Parents are often unsure how to help their children independently, despite 25 hours of therapy beyond the classroom being essential to cognitive growth. Other confounding variables, such as COVID-19, have pushed parents, children, and families into economically disadvantaged and isolating situations with limited guidance on what to do. We once received an email from a teacher who said “However, for parents it is difficult to get help at home with ABA or Communication Systems, which are expensive.” This demonstrates a gap in current providings for parents to get help at home and the value AUesome has even for children who already have access to therapy. 

Ultimately, it is clear that financial and geographic inaccessibility to autism therapy resources and a lack of parental involvement in at-home settings is a pervasive issue that prevents proper cognitive development.

AUesome ameliorates current therapeutic limitations by reinventing the therapy process using a therapy kit accompanied by a digital guidance platform and app.

First, we curate and CAD clinically proven therapy tools and activities used by therapists – such as flashcards to train communication skills, clothespin activities for fine motor skills, and therapressure brushes for sensory skills – into a therapy kit, delivered to parents and educators, who assist their child or students with a catalog of over 30 activities. With these kits, we bring the therapy activities used in the confinement of expensive clinics directly to hundreds of families and organizations, creating an affordable at-home continuation for therapy for neurodiverse children, regardless of socioeconomic background. We ideated these activities alongside professionals on our Board of Advisors and through our personal experiences.

Next, the kits are paired with an instructional platform developed in Javascript, dashboard.auesome.co, where parents can access guidance resources for each activity to educate themselves on how to conduct therapy with their child. This makes therapy accessible both inside and outside the clinical setting, allows for continuous remote training, and increases parental involvement. Try it out with the kit ID “solved” in lowercase. 

Finally, after three iterations, we developed an accompanying app in Flutter. The app provides cognitive games and instructional videos that accompany the activities in the physical kit and recommends a daily schedule, quizzes, and ideas for customization. The app also prompts the parents and educators when their child or student is ready for a new kit, which increases retention and comforts parents that their child is showing signs of progression. This integration with technology further simplifies the therapy process, making it enjoyable, interactive, and personalized for adults and children.

Through our kit, dashboard, and app, AUesome bridges the physical and digital worlds of at-home therapy.

As we conducted market research in search of a solution, interviewing parents to get a better idea of their pain points, one parent, in particular, said something that resonated with us: “The percentage of parental involvement is directly correlated to success with the child. Remote training outside of clinics is the only way to even begin being successful in helping children with autism.” While meeting with professionals to ideate a solution, we sought to integrate already scientifically validated clinical interventional therapies, such as pinching exercises and emotion recognition, with instructional training for parents on how to conduct or implement different exercises to serve neurodiverse individuals with autism. We found that we can help ages under 8 years old the most significantly, however, cognitive ages vary by individual and different resources can be useful depending on one’s interests.

Moreover, we wanted our therapy activities to be accessible both inside and outside a classroom or clinic setting, effectively providing the opportunity for continuous remote training for children with autism. This helps parents and families, who are able to better support their children, educators, who provide collaborative therapeutic resources in their classroom, and children with autism, who are able to access resources anywhere to help grow. Children who already have access to therapy can benefit from the additional at-home supplement AUesome provides, while children who do not have any access have some form of at-home therapy that can help them develop cognitive ability with the support of our digital platform. This supports children with autism and their families, who often lack access to treatment resources due to significant financial and geographic barriers created by existing institutions. Critical therapy is an important part of cognitive growth, and through AUesome’s adaptability and applicability to support families of varying socioeconomic backgrounds, we improve the lives of thousands of individuals across the globe.

We also operate a chapters program. Here, we provide resources for students to advocate for neurodiverse and support their local community, enabling us to extend a direct reach into communities we would not be able to otherwise. This allows AUesome to create a larger impact on people’s lives directly and helps students who participate in our program globally to learn about neurodiversity, therapy, and disability, in order to become more aware of how they can support their community.

Feedback from parents and seeing happy children hold up our activities motivate us to continue breaking barriers to improve accessibility. We would like to share some words from parents, as it could help illustrate how AUesome helps them with their needs (auesome.co/testimonials):

“As a family [w]e believe your kits are a great variety and were both educational and fun. I feel that these are so helpful for my son. They helped him stay engaged and was excited to play with the fun objects and create new things with the chains and shapes.” - Angela Gallegos 

“Autism spectrum is a puzzle!! Every piece is very important to complete the puzzle. Love all your pieces separately which with some guidance can form an incredibly beautiful picture in the form of Au[e]some" - Balakrupa Mukund

“It was very thought out and did well focusing on all the things cognitively and occupationally. My daughter really enjoys matching, and puzzle-like things so the threading was fun. She likes hands-on and brain-stimulating games and toys.” - Leah H.

“My daughter liked the spinner and blocks best because they were fun. I thought the flashcards were great for an autistic student and his/her ability to learn how to identify feelings.” - Mrs. Sarah Williams

“It’s a great sensory box that my son enjoyed getting and continues to play with” - Rebecca Kay 

“We loved it! My son was especially excited about the push bubble!!” - Katy V. 

“My son loves his kit and that makes me happy and satisfied.” - E.K.

“My daughter really enjoys matching, and puzzle like things so the threading was fun. She likes hands on and brain stimulating games [and] toys.” - Lea

Our team was drawn to bring our experiences together in neurodiversity, technology, and business to create AUesome during the LaunchX Entrepreneurship Program in 2020. From our experiences supporting children with special needs in organizations such as the Stanford Neurodiversity Project, Friends of Children with Special Needs, MIT Beaver Works, and more, we recognized the barriers to accessibility prevalent in existing institutions. Moreover, some of us have had our personal experiences being neurodiverse and receiving therapy and have close family members who have autism.

Each of our unique experiences has helped shape our passion to help the neurodiverse community at AUesome and beyond and provided us with the network and foundation to create an impact on those within this community. From receiving licenses at the University of North Carolina’s Autism Focused Interventions and Modules to spending years volunteering to help children with autism and Down syndrome, we were personally drawn to address the evident issue of inaccessibility to therapy by bringing forth our skills in software development, management, and entrepreneurship. For our 3 co-founders and many of our team and chapter members, AUesome is more than just an organization – it’s a mission that we’re personally connected to and drawn to solve. This motivation, along with our technical background, enabled us to grow AUesome into what is it today.

To better understand our problem from people who have worked in tandem with the industry, we’ve consulted 35 professionals, including autism researchers from universities, therapists, teachers, doctors, business executives, and educators, and formed a Board of Advisors. We've also worked on co-designing alongside children with autism. People we've worked with include Dr. Hosea Siu and Dr. Robert Shin from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, Dr. Linda Lotspeich, a Stanford Clinical Professor, Catalin Voss, the CTO of Ello, and Bridgette Leslie, the CEO of IEP&Me, who we’ve worked with on collaborating to enhance our resources with education programs, to name a few.

As a social enterprise, AUesome collaborates with nonprofits, schools, therapists, hospitals, academic and research institutions, center-based treatment facilities, and clinics to reach parents of neurodivergent children, design effective kits and solutions, and provide therapy services to those in need. We play an active role in working towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 17 by working collaboratively with multiple parts of civil society to tackle education inequality, opportunity equity, and inclusion. AUesome involves collective action through partnerships between organizations with databases of neurodiverse families, professors with resources to find effective therapy activities, and businesses with the means to bring such activities to customers.

Ultimately, through working with these professionals, we have been able to enhance our Chapters Program, Global Kits Initiative, and standard kit distributions, which have impacted 5+ countries and 25+ states, including Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, Texas, and Kansas.

A large step in growing our initiative was taking part in eight conferences and competitions, which helped us design and iterate AUesome to the next level by enabling us to engage with various communities, be it the EdTech or telecommunications industry. We spoke at the South by Southwest (SXSW) EDU convention and won 1st place in their Student Startup Competition as we pitched live in front of hundreds of people in Texas, and were awarded $1000 and featured on their website and newsletter. Here, we also had the opportunity to network with industry leaders and collaborate with Bridgette Leslie, who is an advisor on our board and helped us work with the KIPP Public Charter Schools. We won the T-Mobile ChangeMaker Challenge in Washington with over 220 teams in the Equity in Action Category, where we were flown down to T-Mobile’s HQ in Bellevue and won $5000. In doing so, we had the chance to connect with executives in the company, giving elevator pitch after elevator pitch until managers at the Magenta Kids and at the Accessibility Group noticed our initiative and bought kits from us. We were also second place winners in the NFTE World Series of Innovation, where we collaborated for impact in the EY Challenge and won $600, recognizing our potential to support UN SDG 17 to collaborate for impact, and were the $1500 Equity Thru Entrepreneurship Winner for Diamond Challenge, with 835 teams and 37 countries, which enabled us to kick off our funding to file legal documents for our organization. 

To reach our audience, we’ve spoken on and been featured on 20+ news channels, grown on social media, built connections, and spread through word of mouth. This has enabled us to exchange ideas with people with different backgrounds and voice our journey to the world. Here are some news examples:

-Points of Light: https://pointsoflight.org/awards/bay-area-teen-makes-therapy-accessible-for-children-with-autism-and-their-families

-Social Entrepreneur: https://pod.co/social-entrepreneur/tap-into-the-strengths-of-neurodiversity-with-isabella-he 

-Think Kindness Podcast: https://thinkkindness.org/char...

-CBS: https://www.cbsnews.com/boston...

-This Is Reno: https://thisisreno.com/2020/10...

-Patch News: https://patch.com/california/f...

-America Trends Live News Interview: youtube.com/watch?v=RYYDBLvvnjw

-MIT Beaver Works: youtube.com/watch?v=OodlnvwI3Kg

-Yahoo Finance: https://finance.yahoo.com/news...

-SXSW EDU Live Interview: https://schedule.sxswedu.com/2...

-Arc of Massachusetts Live Webinar: youtube.com/watch?v=KmYQCdHx4hs

-LaunchX Team Feature: https://launchx.com/blog/aueso...

-DO WIT Podcast: https://listennotes.com/podcas...

-Tri-City Voice Newspaper: https://tricityvoice.com/02-23... (page 6)

Through our ideation, iteration of over 30 kit designs, and development of our technological platform, AUesome impacts children with autism throughout the world by making therapy more accessible, affordable, and personalized. The three key components for successful at-home therapy are parent-implemented intervention, personalization, and hands-on training. AUesome’s value comes from its kit consolidation, increased accessibility, and integration with modern technology. We compared our product to other play kits and apps like Otismo, Spectrum Surprise, and MITA, and AUesome is the only company that provides customers with all of these critical aspects. Given our unique combination of physical kits and technological components, AUesome has the ability to disrupt existing therapy markets, a $3.84 billion industry expected to grow by 4.5% growth in the next 6 years according to Fortune Business Insight, and lower the barrier of entry for consumers to access resources, significantly reforming the accessibility to essential resources in current landscapes.

As AUesome continues to grow, we strive to make a larger impact in our community, reaching out to more states and countries and finding ways to iterate our product to make it more efficient and accessible. For instance, we hope to enhance our progress tracking with machine learning via digital phenotyping and biometric trait profiling, which can further personalize the digital therapy experience. We also hope to integrate our kits with existing systems, such as insurance and clinics, which can make them a more effective supplement to therapy. In the long run, we hope to support more disabilities and age groups through various kit and activity options. We want to expand to address cognitive abilities such as ADHD and have worked with an individual at the Patrick J McGovern Foundation to identify ways to support domains that we otherwise never would have thought of, such as in the Perkins School of the Blind, with our sensory and texture activities. We also hope to streamline the kit production process and find ways to enhance technology-driven therapy, as we have been able to develop different devices that haven’t yet been deployed into the market.

Based on our market research, collaboration, and iterative human-centered design with professionals and co-designers, we have developed all of our components, which include our various therapy kits with curated and CADed activities that we distribute B2B and B2C, e-learning web platform developed in the Javascript MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js) stack, and our mobile application developed in Flutter and Firebase. We also developed a website (www.auesome.co) where parents have access to guidance tutorials for each activity to educate themselves on how to conduct therapy with their child using the activities in the kit and read our 15+ blog series.

Additionally, we have developed more advanced technologies that accompany our kits and help with therapy, although producing these in scale has been challenging. One we invented (patent-pending) is called Gensic, which uses biometric properties–heartbeat and emotion–to generate real-time personalized music for children with autism. Our technology receives heartbeat data from a pulse sensor wired to a Raspberry Pi and emotion classification from an OpenCV MTCNN Deepface model and uses their specific values to mutate chord and wave frequencies with Pure Data, a software framework. The music Gensic generates eases overstimulation and stress while allowing neurodiverse children to express themselves. In practice, this would be a premium music therapy activity we could provide to users either through their kit or via our digital platform. However, it is extremely challenging to integrate as manufacturing and sourcing would be in diseconomies of scale, especially given the current global chip shortage. For the time being, our mobile and web platforms accompanied by our kits serve as the primary elements of our therapeutic experience.

We have launched our product in the market, distributing 17,500 therapy activities across 500+ requests, from shipping individual kits to families to delivering waves of customized kits to corporations and hospitals. Additionally, we operate 18 global chapters where we help students advocate in their community through the materials and resources we provide. Based on various kits being distributed to organizations, schools, and families as well as our Chapters program’s impact, we have served an estimated 10,000 people, including children with autism, students, parents, families, educators, therapists, and doctors, and aim to serve 20,000 by next year. 

Furthermore, we maintain a Facebook community group for parents to remain connected as well as an Instagram page (@auesome.co) with 40 posts and 600+ followers, through which we've reached tens of thousands of people worldwide.

A common challenge we face is manufacturing our kits and finding ways to scale production. Currently, our team helps make our kits, but this may serve as a challenge as we receive a greater number of requests, especially when companies or organizations request for large waves of kits containing hundreds of activities in a short period of time. This challenge is even more prevalent with newer activities we hope to integrate with more technologies and complex features.

Additionally, another challenge we face is the limited reach we have beyond our network, particularly on a global scale. We haven’t reached Africa and Australia and hope to build connections and collaborate with more organizations to overcome this barrier of access and communication.

We’ve worked on iterating our kits, testing various designs, raising funds, and receiving feedback from professionals in several schools, nonprofits, and companies. Some include Barrington Public Schools, Beacon ABA Services, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston Public Schools, the Brazilian Government, Brazil Municipal Department of Education of Duque de Caxias, ChildStrive, Cupertino Union School District, Ernest and Young, Friends of Children with Special Needs, Jefferson Elementary School, KIPP Heartwood, KIPP Public Charter Schools, KIPP San Jose Collegiate, Magenta Kids, Maurice J Tobin School, Murdock-Portal Elementary School, Quabbin Regional School District, San Leandro Unified School District, SN Inclusion, Swann Clinic for Behavioral Health, T-Mobile Accessibility Group, The Arc of Massachusetts, To The Limit Maths, Ukrainian Hospital Tsentr Materi Ta Dytyny Im. Rudnyeva, and Walnut Street Center Inc. We’ve also consulted professionals in various universities, including Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School, Duke’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, MIT Lincoln Laboratory Beaver Works, Stanford Autism Center and Stanford Pediatrics, and University of Nevada Reno School of Medicine. Collaborating for impact has enabled us to reach more people and gain a breadth of ideas from various professionals. We also partner with some software companies, such as Cynderhost, which enable us to scale our digital platform and provide accessible resources for cloud computing. 

To make the largest impact in the neurodiverse community, we identified that becoming a social enterprise would benefit our reach in the long run. Our kits are sold individually or as a subscription – with personalization, progression, and progress tracking – directly to the parents (B2C sales), as well as organizations aforementioned (B2B sales) that receive tailored activities through bulk orders to assist their neurodiverse patients. Each kit has a per-unit production cost of approximately $6.72, as materials are sourced in bulk from other suppliers, and is sold at $12-15 per kit, depending on its contents, for a gross profit margin of 55.2%. We aim to partner with manufacturers to bring the cost of production for each unit of product to around $1, allowing us to scale up sales while decreasing production costs, and collaborate with insurance providers, special education programs in schools, and more organizations to ensure every child has a kit. We price point our kits in the most accessible way possible and earnings that we gain from sales are directed to helping our community through an organizational support model. For instance, AUesome has generated revenue through corporate deals, such as building 100 kits for $1200 for T-Mobile’s Accessibility Group. This allows us to allocate our earnings to giving kits to groups like Ukrainian Hospitals (as shown in the image) and the Brazilian Government through our Global Kits Initiative. 

Having this balance between profit and social impact is essential to being financially stable. We have raised $12,500 via crowdfunding on GoFundMe and non-dilutive seed funding to help finance essential stages of our startup’s development. Receiving grants, such as winning the national $500 Dream It Do It Grant, enables us to allocate a higher budget for research and development as well as fund other internal initiatives. 

We will generate revenue with an organizational support model through selling kits, primarily through bulk-order deals with corporations (CSR) and large organizations, which will enable us to finance other operations that help low-income clients, such as families who do not necessarily have access to therapy, all while maintaining our kit production. As our demand scales, the average total cost it takes for additional users will reduce, enabling us to allocate additional funds to developing higher-quality physical kits. Creating a brand identity will also enable us to have a dedicated customer base that seeks to receive kits more frequently in a subscription-based model. From a technological standpoint, it would be important to develop software that can effectively scale, but our existing web hosting partner minimizes a significant amount of the cost already. 

As we look forward, we hope to streamline production in our supply chain to ensure that we can reduce the cost of production to keep our products as affordable as possible.