Denver tech company launches AI tool with goal of improving access to autism care
A company based in Denver designed, developed and is now piloting an AI tool that they say will transform autism care. Their goal of making intervention more accessible for everyone.
When trying to access autism care for her son, Brittany Tarango remembers the first thing she heard.
"I was told the waitlist was around 2 years," Tarango said. "It was very disappointing because Jackson needed help now -- like, he needed the services now."
She was persistent and found an opening that would shorten the wait to five months. And in August, Jackson started therapy.
"It has been life changing, if I'm being honest," she said.
Amol Deshpande says his son had a similar response.
"My son here now as an almost 14-year-old -- it's been a transformative change: getting in early and being able to do those things. But it was hard, and even for someone with means, so that sort of led me to believe this is a pretty serious problem: access to care," Deshpande said.
The experience led to change in his own life. With a background as an engineer and successful startup founder he helped launch Frontera Health. Their focus, he says, is on transforming autism care with artificial intelligence.
"iPad or iPhone or Android device, the technology, we've built it to have a relatively kind of low bar in the terms of quality of audio and video that you have to capture. We wanted to make sure that this solution was practical," Grant Sickle of Frontera Health said.
Using digital phenotyping, the team at Frontera says their AI system can watch and listen to recorded interactions between a child and technician and is trained by expert clinicians to analyze and reason.
"There's no way for the human mind to generate this amount of data," Deshpande said.
Using that data, a detailed summary of those session is produced.
"This level of artificial intelligence, we believe they could do 10 or 15 sessions in an hour," he added.
He says it doesn't eliminate the need for human interaction.
"AI, ours or anybody else's, is not going to replace a therapist or their judgment. But what we absolutely do have to do with AI is we have to provide leverage on their time," Deshpande said.
Tarango says she welcomes a solution to improve access but she has concerns about privacy and accuracy.
Deshpande says health privacy laws still apply and like other AI technology, it will be continuously learning.
"They are concerned, we are concerned about it, too. I mean, we have to build an ever larger data set in order to be confident about the selectivity, the sensitivity and the precision of this. But ... we measure all of those things against humans, so you could argue it's already more precise than the vast majority of humans that are out there," he said.
Frontera is now piloting their technology in their in-house clinics but hope to make it widely available in the future.
