Discovering Autism with Microsoft Surface

I met Freena Eijffinger again at this year’s at TechEd Berlin after doing some cartons for her film crew last years and she casually mentioned she has been given a Microsoft Surface .  Her company (FreenaNL Multiouch) is developing an application to diagnose autism in children and the robust nature of Surface (it uses cameras rather than a touch screen) and its simple and logical interface make it ideal for this. Moreover a consistent test gives consistent results and removes the drudgery of testing from the specialists working with these children enabling them to make additional qualitative observations. 

Freena has also carefully thought about what to do with the test results and provides personal private data to the child’s carers and parents to monitor progress as well as anonymous data for trend analysis by various research bodies via Azure. 

Freena is obviously much better at explaining this so I fired up my camera and posted a short interview to YouTube

(apologies about the noise in the background)

The actual application is still being developed and tested, but Freena hopes to publish what it looks like early next year, and I'll keep you posted as I am fascinated by the use of Surface , it’s integration to Azure and the potential use of BI to try and understand more about this terrible disease.