If you are a Small to Medium Enterprise providing services to people with autism spectrum disorders within the EU, would you consider participating in a European Commissioned Research Project?
All we need from you is some anonymised data, the time and resources involved are minimal, but your input would be invaluable. In return you would have access to the programme that is described below. If you are interested please contact me - we are simply registering interest at this time.
Abstract
In simple terms, the project aims at providing more support, information and advice to all individuals (practitioners, parents, families, etc) related to individuals with autism spectrum disorders.
The European population of people considered to have Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) is extremely heterogeneous, with each individual presenting a unique profile of strengths, weaknesses and support needs. As a consequence, diverse service provision has emerged within the European Union, which reflects broad classifications between the state sector, the independent sector and family/kinship organisations. Traditionally, services are located within generic services provision for people with learning disabilities or those with mental health needs. However, as the recognition of ASDs is increasing, service providers are moving towards developing ASD-specific care, which involve approaches that are flexible, reflective and reflexive, including the continuous modification of care strategies.
The individualised nature of care for people with ASDs raises the financial costs considerably. In the EU, care for some three million people with ASDs is estimated at 13,500,000,000 EUR per annum (Biomed Project for Autism, 2001, University of Exeter / DCACT)
The outcome will be a Knowledge Based System (KBS) capable to create genuine inferences and predictions, when combined with qualitative analysis. The KBS will provide the opportunity to improve the efficiency and quality of care processes for children and adults with ASDs. More specifically, the KBS will provide:
* maximised efficiency in care processes leading to a reduction in costs
* interactive access to information
* facilitating self-assessed identification of support requirements
* customised staff training programmes
* accreditation encompassing quality of life issues within a framework of rights
* development of care provisions
* continuous updating and monitoring of additional information
* recognition of trends.
The KBS will be based on data mining techniques. Data mining has been the state-of-the-art sector of the information systems industry for the past decade. Its purpose is to discover knowledge from large databases using various techniques, based on artificial intelligence and statistics theories. Through several years of intensive research, the team from the University of Patras has developed and published a number of algorithms, covering all major data mining areas. These algorithms have been implemented and combined to create a powerful, novel, fully-scalable knowledge discovery application, of which they have full legal ownership through patents or publications.
The following diagram sketches a possible architecture of such KBS.
Diagrams cannot be displayed at this time, sorry.
The form of input data (both document and cases databases) will be based on the “event” concept (see next figure).
Thus, observations of any kind, provided by users, will be recorded on the databases. The database scheme will be designed after a requirement analysis phase, where user’s requirements will be identified. Data mining techniques will extract knowledge from the databases. Also, experts will be allowed to add empirical knowledge, as well. The users will interact with this knowledge module.
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