Livautism

1 in every 59 children is diagnosed with autism. In Ghana, there are are over 230,000 people living with autism or a related disorder.

Autism intervention is most effective when identified in the early years of children. It can be reliably diagnosed in children as early as 2 years old but unfortunately, parents in Ghana start doing something about this as late as 8 years. This is due to the lack of certified professionals in the healthcare system, high cost of helping children with autism and social stigma and lack of knowledge.

Livautism gives parents and caregivers access to therapy programs based on the special needs of the children, that can be implemented at home or at school using mobile technology, machine learning, and data analytics. Parents and caregivers get access to certified therapists coach them through the program. They can also request for home visits from therapist. 

There are over 230K people in Ghana living with autism and other related disorders who are not getting the care and support they need to live the life deserve. 

Autism and related disorders can be reliably identified as early as 18 months in a childs life. If identified during the early years, intervention measures can be implemented to allow the child not miss out of the education and life they deserve. 

Unfortunately, in rural and marginalized, parents identify this as late as 8 years. In addition to identify where their children lie within the spectrum, there is significant lack of therapists and professionsal in the healthcare system, there is very little knowledge about how to help children with autism and it is extremely expensive to provide full care for children with autism.

As a result of the gross lack in support and knowledge for children with autism, they are not able to get a good education, they face social stigma and are marginalized within their own communities. This sometimes breaks homes are parents are not able to deal with the emotional pressure that comes with being there for these children.

Our primary target are parents/families living in the rural and marginalized communities who have children with autism and other related disorders. Traditionally, these parents/families make less than $5 a day and cannot afford the high cost providing the care their children need. With Livautism, parents are able to take control on the development of their children without worry about the cost or access to professionals who can coach them through the sessions.

Livautism is ideal for caregivers and educators either in school or in the homes. It provides them with coaching on how to teach children with autism and other related disorders. Parents are able to share access to their children’s programs for them to implement for the day in the event parents are not able to do it themselves. Using our solutions, teachers gain insights on what autism and other related disorders are, how to teach children within the spectrum and improve their skills as teachers. 

Livautism is supports practitioners in the healthcare system by providing them with a means on conducting diagnostics on children and track their development over time. They are able to conduct research on how to support children with autism better.

Livautism helps parents get access to therapy sessions for their children with autism and support from certified therapists using mobile technology, machine learning and data analytics. 

Parents do no longer need to make long trips from their communities, spend so much money on transport to see someone at the hospital and get assistance for their children. Our intelligent messaging platform diagnosis children with autism and other related disorders, creates a task-based program for parents to implement in the homes and connects them with certified therapists who provide coaching and support. Using machine learning and analytics, the platform knows when children need a change in their program and prompts therapists to make adjustments in the programs. 

We understand the cost involved in running a center-based program for children with autism. To solve that, Livautism uses bit-sized instructions, actions and prompts together with coaching from therapists to provide programs that can be done anywhere. Livautism does not require a tablet; it can be accessed on any mobile device with or without internet.

In providing holistic support to parents and caregivers support children with autism and related disorders; Livautism focuses on:

1. Diagnosis: Parents, caregivers and healthcare practitioners can easily diagnose children based on accredited diagnosis systems for children with autism and other related disorders. They simply need to subscribe to the service, provide basic information on the child and respond to a survey designed to identify autism and other related disorders. Results from diagnosis are used to create programs which is reviewed and approved by certified therapists within 15 minutes.

2. Coaching & Consultation: Parents and caregivers receive bit-sized instructions, actions and prompts to allow them work with the children. There are therapists who provide support for parents as they are working with the children during the day. Therapist provide coaching and home visits to parents giving them the ability to make a difference in the life of their children.

3. Collaboration: Livautism understands the need for collaboration between parents, caregivers and health professionals. Parents have the ability to share programs and progress of their children with caregivers and healthcare providers to keep everyone in the loop and focused on the same goals.

Livautism administers daily surveys to collect data on progress on children and uses data analytics and machine learning to adjust the learning path of children. Based on survey results, the platform provides recommendations on next lessons or schedules a call or chat session with a therapist.

There has been a significant increase of access to mobile phones in Ghana over the last decade. Mobile phone penetration in Ghana is above 100% with internet penetration increase. 

Livautism uses intelligent messaging technology to provide parents in rural and marginalized communities access to therapy sessions based on the special needs of the children through initial diagnostics that would have otherwise be unreachable to them. 

Not only do they get the therapy sessions but they have trained therapists available on call to support them as they put in place interventions to help their children with autism. 

There is no need for any new tablet. Parents can access the product features right from their phones. It is built with rural markets in mind. 

Livautism is intelligent enough to know if the child is making progress in his or her program and adapt the program to help achieve desired behavior within children using data analytics and machine learning. It goes a step further to schedule a session with the trained therapist to give insights and coaching to parents and caregivers through phone calls or chat sessions.

The core technology that Livautism uses in mobile technology to deliver content and enable interaction between parents/caregivers and therapists. Our offline features uses voice calls (IVR) and text messaging to deliver content to users who do not have access to the internet. For parents/caregivers who have access to internet enabled phones, they can get access using Facebook messenger and WhatsApp messenger. 

Once diagnostics surveys are administered, data is analyzed with the results sent to our machine learning engine which then processes the appropriate therapy program to administer. Our algorithm has been trained with various possibilities based on the risk levels of children and where they may lie on the spectrum. 

As the program is being administered, our machine learning engine is being trained and provide an “overlap” program report at the end of the month which is approved by the assigned case manager before prompts are sent to parents/caregivers. 

Our analytics dashboard stored analytics and progress on 6 main domains of development:

• Cognitive skills

• Academics

• Motor skills

• Communication and Language

• Play and Leisure

• Self-care

The goal of Livautism is to make sure that children with autism and other related disorders have structured learning for life. 

All parents who have children with autism and other related disorders are continuous looking for low-cost solutions to help their children no miss out on their childhood and grow well. 

Livaustism gives parents the chance to take action on the development of their children by providing them with easy and low-cost access to programs and trained therapists which they otherwise not have easy access to due to the high cost. 

Parents are able to work with their children on critical developmental areas themselves using instructions, actions and prompts that is easy to understand and implement. They are also able to share information with caregivers who can continue from where they left off. 

With more parents getting easy access to early intervention, more and more children will get diagnosed early, parents will be empowered to help and support others who have children with similar conditions as they use Livautism. They can become community guides who support and go on to teach other parents about the importance of early childhood development and interventions.

Ultimately, no child is truly left behind, people think more about how to help children with disorders, more and more parents and caregivers will do the necessary checks about children in their early years no matter their socioeconomic status.

Since 2013, Livautism has been manually implemented in Kumasi Ghana supporting over 100 children with autism without any technology. That period has been used to fine-tune the product, understand the clinical work involved in making a difference in the value chain of providing support for children with autism and determine the impact of our system. We have seen a 22% increase across behavior skills using this approach and look to increase this while scaling our impact by 5 times

Livautism is currently in the prototype and development stages with pilot scheduled to commence in October of this year. 

Over the next 12 months, we expect to serve about 5,000 families who have children with autism living in the rural, marginalized and underserved communities. We expect to increase the capacity of teachers over the12 month period. 

Based on the fact that there are over 1.2 billion people in Africa and a probability of occurrence of autism at 56:1, in 5 years, working with all major hospitals in Ghana, community centers and schools we estimate to provide intervention to 215,000 people with autism.

Our goals in the next 12 months are:

• Complete the beta version of Livautism

• Pilot with 100 families

• Integrate the product in Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital

• Partner with 5 schools who run Livautism as part of their in-take evaluations for children entering their nursery/creche or kindergarten levels

With the next 5 years, our aim is to:

• Implement voice calls for therapy coaching sessions and data collection

• Expanding the number of diagnostics available on Livautism. Identifying the disorder and creating a based program

• Parents will have the ability to share the information of their children with hospitals and schools on an ongoing basis to help drive meaningful conversations about the development of the child

• Improving the data analytics system and sharing data with research bodies around the world and in Africa

• Develop an algorithm that learns from the changes and progress in a child’s program and automatically creating an “overlap” program. Fully automating clinical feedback

• Expand into other markets in Sub-Saharan Africa.

• Beneficiaries of the national health insurance scheme can access Livautism.

Team capacity: Our team is currently made up of a product/business developer and a back-end developer. We are lacking capacity in areas of machine learning and data analytics

Technical expertise: We lack access to technical expertise and research work in autism. Having access to work and researchers who have done work within the field would improve our product development combining the best of research with product development.

Funding: We are currently bootstrapping the development of the product and operations out of pocket. Getting access to funding would accelerate our work.

Partnership & Distribution: Our work relies on working with health care providers, government agencies and developing partners. We currently do not have established networks that will help drive our solution

Team capacity: We are currently working with contractors on our product development. We looking to leverage on the networks developed by our co-founders over the years to get in touch with the right people to join our team and support our work.

Technical expertise: We working at establishing relationships with the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Ghana as well as researchers to give us insights on interventions. We are hoping to work with MIT Solve to get access to experts within the field as well.

Funding: We are currently fundraising from friends and family, and applying for grant funding to drive our work. We have designed a business model and looking to share our deck with prospective impact investors.

Partnership & Distribution: We have started conversations with prospective partners who have access to communities, schools and children with autism. Our plan is to work with existing therapy centers and provide our solution to them.

We are currently a team of 2 working on the solution. We have 3 additional advisors who provide insights on product development and expertise in therapy sessions for the beneficiaries.

Rudolph Ampofo is our co-founder & CEO. He has been working in education over the last 6 years with three of those years in education technology. He is also the co-founder of Wings for Life that implements a manual version of Livautism. He represents Eneza Education at MIT Solve as a Solver in the teachers and educators cohort. He is also a GSBI fellow. He was previously a teacher and has dedicated himself to helping people at the bottom of the pyramid get the education they deserve.

Efua Gambrah-Sampaeny is our co-founder & CTO. She has been working with mobile technology for the last 6 years. Efua has been a tech leader for the last 3 years using voice and text messaging technology to reach the unreachable. She is passionate about improving the livelihoods of underserved communities.

We believe that Livautism can reach its full potential by leveraging on partnerships. We are currently working with the following:

• Wings for Life and Star Academy: Wings for Life in collaboration with Star Academy (based in South Africa) support us in content development, program design and provision of board-certified therapists to help children within the spectrum.

• United Way Ghana, Mother’s Nest Montessori School and Komfo Anokey Teaching hospital are implementing partners who will be working with us once we are done with the beta version and pilot the product.

We provide access to certified therapy sessions for children with autism and other related disorders who live in rural and marginalized communities who would have otherwise not gotten access to such services because of cost or lack of expert resources. 

Livautism uses simple messaging technology to identify the risk levels or children with autism and other related disorders as early as 18 months and provide clinical assessments and tailor-made, simple, task-based programs that can be done by parents in the home or at school by teachers. Monthly reviews are done, based on data collected, by certified therapists out of which “overlap” programs are designed to address specific issues in the development of the child

We run a B2B2C model where healthcare providers pay licensing fees for new and current parents get access to our diagnostics software in order to help them determine where their children lie within the spectrum. License fees are per user basis. We run 1 diagnostic sessions per user. Healthcare providers get dashboards that give them insights on the results as well as progress the child is making over time so they are always in a good position to consult on the health of the child. 

After diagnostics, parents can pay a subscription fee to get access to certfiied therapists and home-based programs to support the development of their children. Because healthcare providers have data on the children, they are also able to give feedback and request for hospital sessions for parents.

As an early stage organization, we believe that our success largely depends on the partnerships and support we get from the larger community of social innovators, entrepreneurs and organizations. Solve represents that to us. Solve has managed to bring the organizations and individuals who care about the challenges as much as we do. 

We believe that Solve will will give us the opportunity to improve our work, dialogue with the right people in research and impact and funding partners who would either fund our efforts or work with us scale our impact. 

In addition to giving us access to the resources and support we need to scale our solution, MIT Solve puts us in the same room of wonderful solutions that are working towards similar goals allowing us to share ideas and learn from each other.

Corporates, Foundations & NGOs:

• Aga Khan Foundation

• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

• CARE

• Segal Family Foundation

• The LEGO Foundation

• Compassion International

• World Vision International

• Sesame Workshop

• Morgridge Family Foundation

• Dubai Cares

• USAID

• Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation

• Johnson & Johnson

• Echoing Green

• Innospark Ventures

• ALDI

• Western Union Foundation

Technical Expertise and advisory:

• Children's Neuropsychological Services

• MIT - JWEL institute

• MIT - Early Childhood Cognitive Lab (Laura Schulz)

• MIT - Open Learning

• MIT D-Lab

• MIT Integrated Learning Initative

Livautism focuses on providing low-cost access to certified therapy sessions for children living with autism. Once children are diagnosed, programs are designed and continuously adjusted based on their growth and development. 

We plan to use the prize to advance our work in machine learning and AI to quickly identify the gains made by children and create “overlapping” programs that will help children grow in their development. 

With improved AI, we will be able to expand the number of diagnostics capable on our solution and create customized programs based on multiple user profiles. This will make the lives of parents easier and get access to quality therapy for their children.

Prize funding will also be used to develop natural language processing and deliver content to parents over voice technology.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, woman are mostly tasked with taking care of children with autism in the home. 

With the prize, we will be able to coach more women to be community leaders and support other parents who have children with autism or other related disorders. 

We will have the capacity to build content tailored at incentivizing and motivating women encourage other woman to identify the risk levels of their children and take action. 

Livautism focuses on providing low-cost access to certified therapy sessions for children living with autism. 

Once children are diagnosed, programs are designed and continuously adjusted based on their growth and development. 

We plan to use the prize to advance our work in machine learning and AI to quickly identify the gains made by children and create “overlapping” programs that will help children grow in their development. 

With improved AI, we will be able to expand the number of diagnostics capable on our solution and create customized programs based on multiple user profiles. This will make the lives of parents easier and get access to quality therapy for their children.

Prize funding will also be used to develop natural language processing and deliver content to parents over voice technology.