For a child suffering from autism, a treatment involving constant back and forth journeys between home and hospital can be difficult to cope with.
But this also has many other shortcomings: it marginalises the potential role of parents in helping their children, doesn’t reflect real life behaviours, is not intensive enough and fails to consider the specificities of each patient.
Last but not least, it is a major financial burden for society as the number of children diagnosed with autism keeps increasing each year and a cure has yet to be discovered.
With all these problems in mind, the team in the EU-backed project MICHELANGELO (Patient-centric model for remote management, treatment and rehabilitation of autistic children) has spent the past 42 months working on home-based solutions for assessing and treating autism outside the clinical environment.
Silvio Bonfiglio is the coordinator of the MICHELANGELO project, a role he was given due to his considerable experience in medical imaging, interactive solutions, user interfaces, mobile point of care and eHealth.
He highlights the main results of the project and expands on his plans for bringing it to patients by 2017.
Source: Research*EU magazine April 2015
Project website: www.michelangelo-project.eu