Abangmanis: Speech Theraphy for Autism Monitoring Mobile Application

The number of children with autism continue to rise every year. To support families with children who have autism, the government of Indonesia has setup a special body called Pusat Layanan Autis (Autism Service Centre or ASC) in every province in Indonesia, under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education and Culture. In the Riau Islands province, the ASC is located in Batam. To lower the obstacles and problems in autism-related behavior in order to improve the live quality and functional freedom, a number of therapies can be performed, such as applied behavior analysis, speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, social therapy, play therapy, behavior therapy, development therapy, visual therapy, and biomedical therapy. Currently in ASC Batam, there are six therapists, which consist of speech therapists, occupational therapists, and physiotherapist. These six therapists serve 65 children, with every session is designed as one-on-one (one therapist per children in every session). Therapies for children with autism must be performed comprehensively and every child would need different types of therapies. The type and number of therapy that any particular child need would depend on the development of the child in every therapy session. Therefore, the monitoring of child therapy development is very crucial. However, with the high number of children that needs the service and the very crowded schedule that must performed by a therapist, this monitoring are performed manually using paper and pen. On the other, the type of notes is limited due to the media; moreover, there are probably items that are less detailed in the recording. These problems are more pronounced in the speech therapy. Based on the preliminary study, we observed that there is a requirement for free open source software to facilitate a special need in ASC that is to simplify the recording and tracking of the development of speech therapy for children with autism. The solution that we developed was called Abangmanis, a short of the autism speech therapy monitoring mobile application, which is equipped with multimedia contents such as audio recording to improve the quality of the recorded data.