December 13, 2012

App Thursday: A Mom, and Her App: Technology Affecting Autism

Therese Wantuch of Training With Gaming, is a local mom who created an iPad/iPhone app called Training Faces, for folks with autism. It is inspired by her 21-yea-old son, Jack, photographed here in her Mt. Washington home Monday November 19, 2012. The app is designed to help people with Autism, Asperger's Syndrome and other special needs with emotion recognition. The app is geared to help in three distinct ways; improve recognition of the emotion, the meaning behind the emotion and then the speed at which the individual can interpret the emotion. 



Therese Wantuch can’t help but boast about her son.

A gifted cellist, he composes his own music.

He’s played to a packed Carnegie Hall as a student in the orchestra at Cincinnati’s School for Creative and Performing Arts.

And now, Jack Wantuch, an autistic 21-year-old, is driving. All on his own.

“It’s a major milestone,” said Therese Wantuch. “Some things take longer for him, but people really don’t know the incredible things that these kids can do. They’re talented people, who just happen to have autism.”

The Mount Washington mother is on a mission to help children and families across the globe break through some of the daily challenges faced by those with autism and Asperger’s Syndrome.

This year she launched Training Faces, an application for iPads, iPhones and Android phones designed to help people like Jack Wantuch with emotion recognition.

Since its launch in May, the app has had thousands of downloads from across the globe, underscoring a “hot new trend” in the autism community that’s rooted in technology, said Andy Shih, senior vice president for scientific affairs at New York-based Autism Speaks. The non-profit focuses on autism research and advocacy.

“In the past six months, there isn’t a day that goes by without me hearing from a member about a new device or app that’s been helpful in their daily lives,” said Shih. “Some of the functions of these new tools existed before, but they tended to be expensive and clunky equipment that was not easily accessible by your average family. The integration of mobile computing into our daily lives is what’s really driving this.”

At its website, www.autismspeaks.org, the non-profit offers links to more than 200 apps, including Training Faces, which is available in English and Spanish.

Shih said Training Faces is reminiscent of software developed by Yale University about six years ago that “trains individuals how to recognize facial expressions and emotions.”

Understanding the difference between a smile and frown, and the emotions behind the expressions, is among the most common daily obstacles encountered by those with autism and other special needs, said Shih.

With Training Faces, Therese Wantuch said she wanted to create a learning tool that was fun and functional for children with autism.

Focused on a passenger train traveling to destinations around the world, the game requires players to match a specified emotion with the correct picture of the passenger’s facial expression. Each session includes four rounds, and each round has a time limit. At the completion of each session, the player will get to see the train complete the route on the map.

The game is designed not only to help children with autism improve their emotion recognition, but better understand the meaning behind the expression and interpret expressions more quickly, Therese Wantuch said.

“It helps them answer the question, ‘Why are they happy or why are they sad?’” she said.



A full-time insurance broker, Therese Wantuch paid a developer to write the code for the app. Her son and daughter composed its music, and her friends and family agreed to have their happy, angry, sad, mad and emotional mugs as the game’s featured faces.

From her experience with her son, who was diagnosed at 18 months, Therese Wantuch said she knows firsthand the difference early intervention can make with children with autism.

“When he was diagnosed, we went all out,” she said. “My husband went part-time with his job. We did all the programs. One was called floor time, and we spent at least 20 minutes a day just getting in his face and working with him on verbal skills.”

The skills learned from Training Faces are paramount for children with autism to become more independent adults, she said.

“As the diagnosis of autism continues to go up, we need these folks to be independent,” she said. “It’s what gives them a fuller a life, and lets them get decent housing own their own and get a job so they’re not sitting in Mommy and Daddy’s family room their entire life. That’s not fair to them or their family.”

Nationwide, 1 in every 88 children is diagnosed with some form of autism each year, according to the Autism Society of Greater Cincinnati.

While there is no known single cause for autism, medical experts say it occurs because of abnormalities in brain structure or function.

For now, no hard data measures the impact apps like Therese Wantuch’s can have on an individual with autism, said Shih.

“Whether it’s an app developed by a mom or at the MIT Media Lab, there does need to be more controlled, unbiased research to better understand that these applications indeed have a real impact,” he said. “But there are a lot of anecdotal reports on how great they are, and we have no doubt that these are emerging as new tools to help individuals and families maintain a higher quality of life.”

Since its launch in May, Training Faces has had 4,500 downloads, with users spanning the globe from Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Singapore and Sweden. It’s selling for $2.99 at the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Therese Wantuch declined to say how much she’s invested in her effort so far, but said she’s mostly used money that otherwise would have been put into her 401(k) retirement plan.

Once her initial investment is recouped, she plans to give a percentage of each download to autism charities and research.

Her work has landed her a spot as a finalist for a $25,000 investment from Bad Girl Ventures, the local micro-lending organization created to fund woman-owned start-ups. She’ll learn Thursday if her business plan is the winner.

The money would go to boosting work already under way on other gaming apps on which she’s working, she said. She wants to use proceeds toward her longer-term goal of creating apps and programs for adults with autism that help build skills for employment.

“It’s my big, hairy, audacious goal,” she said. “These kids know so much, but they’re so underestimated. They just need a chance.”

(Source: news.cincinnati.com)

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