Could This App Detect Autism Among Kids? App Has Almost 94 Percent Accuracy, Researchers Find Out

Autism disorder among kids as young as two can now be detected through a mobile app developed by scientists at University of Buffalo. With the use of eye-tracking technology, researchers said that they could identify if a kid is showing symptoms of autism disorder with almost 94 percent accuracy.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that 1 out of 68 children in the United States was diagnosed with autism disorder, but it is sometimes not confirmed till a kid enters school. However, things are different now. Scientists have created a mobile app which might detect autism through the use of eye-tracking technology. With this technology, researchers said that they could know with almost 94 percent accurateness if a child as young as two has an autism disorder.

The finding comes from research that looked at 32 kids between 2 and 10, which half of them were diagnosed previously with the developmental disorder. The mobile app works by tracking the eye movements of the child while they gaze at photos of different social scenes.

The result: kids with autism disorder have scattered eye movements, while children without autism disorder are a lot more focused. "We speculate that it is due to their lack of ability to interpret and understand the relationship depicted in the social scene," Daily News quoted Kun Woo Cho, student-author of the research, as saying. In the research, the mobile app has an accurateness score of 93.96 percent.

Dr. Wenyao Xu of Buffalo's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences said in a statement according to DisabilityScoop that the beauty of the mobile app is that it can be used by parents at home to assess the risk of whether a child may have an autism disorder. He added that this app could allow families to look for therapy sooner and enhance the benefits of the treatment.

Researchers plan to enlarge their research to 300 or 400 kids. Also, they want to know whether this mobile application could tap some other neurological cases, like attention deficit condition.