Mike Carr – who has a profoundly autistic 34-year-old son, reviews products he’s used and provides insight for parents of severely or profoundly autistic children. He highlights a recent article in Neuroscience News about the interaction between CNTN4 and APP proteins, suggesting potential benefits for autism research from Alzheimer’s funding. He updates on the Acura door lock, praising its app integration and security features, and advises against using a specific wireless sleep sensor due to its ineffectiveness, recommending Ring portable cameras instead. He shares a humorous anecdote about a diaper alarm that went off in public, while emphasizing its utility for monitoring bedwetting. Despite ongoing challenges with his son’s bedwetting, he finds M4 super thick diapers somewhat helpful and seeks further solutions from the community. Future episodes will continue to explore both low tech and high tech solutions for parents.
Transcript:
Mike Carr (00:12):
Well, welcome back to Autism Labs. This week we’re going to cover six different things that might be of interest to parents with severely or profoundly autistic kiddos living at home. There was an article yesterday in the neuroscience news that talked about the interaction between two proteins. One protein is called CNTN four, and that has to do with neurological development problems related to autism, and then a PP is a different protein. It’s related to neurodegeneration. In Alzheimer’s patients, there might be some more research funding available for Alzheimer’s patients that will then also benefit autism patients. Since these two proteins seem to interact with one another in the brain. If you want more information, I did a post yesterday on the Autism labs Facebook page. Just go to Facebook, look up autism labs, and you’ll see a post from 5 15 24 where I give you the actual link to the article in neuroscience news.
(01:11):
The second thing is an update on door locks. I’ve mentioned this last week that we have this Acura, a door lock or a car door lock. It’s worked great. We’ve been testing it now for a couple of weeks, but there are other varieties that are out there, but this one has an app. We’ve given all our colleagues that work with our son, both a thumbprint entry as well as their phone number. It’s really easy for us to see who’s with our son when they showed up, when they left to make sure the door’s locked. It has an auto lock feature highly recommended. However, another device not so good. This was the wireless sensor that we were using for monitoring our son’s sleep. It doesn’t have to wear anything at all. This thing just fits on the wall and it goes over his head. We thought this would be so cool.
(01:54):
The problem we’ve discovered is if he doesn’t sleep in a vertical line, right, so the sensor’s right over him, looking down on his chest, it doesn’t work. Plus, it’s a bit of a pain to install, so we’re not going to recommend that. Unfortunately. However, there’s something that we’ve used for quite a while, and I think you guys probably are aware of this, these little ring portable cameras. These things are awesome, and so you can put it in his bedroom, make sure that he or she’s asleep. It’s color, it’s high resolution and it’s sound, right, and you can talk to ’em. So it’s like this idea that, Hey, Michael, go back to bed. If he gets up right, he may or may not listen to you, but at least you can talk to him. You can also listen, and so you get the audio cue if he or she gets up and you can see.
(02:42):
So I highly recommend these portable things. You can move around as you need them, living room, kitchen, wherever. Okay, funny story. So we’ve been trying to get our son to stop wetting the bed and when he was littler, stop wetting his pants so we’d have a diaper on him, but we actually were using some of the portable alarms for his diaper and it worked great. The way it works is you put the sensor down inside his diaper. If he wets his diaper, the sensor goes off with a loud sound or a buzzing or whatever the problem is. I forgot to take it out before my wife took him to Target. So she’s standing in the line ready to check out, and this thing goes off because he wet his diaper, so they work great. Just be sure and take it out of the diaper if you’re going to take your son or daughter out, and of course, you can also use this as an alarm for bedwetting at night if that’s something that you want to do.
(03:37):
We have not had 34 years old. We still can’t prevent him from laying to bed at night. What we have though, tried to do and what’s worked reasonably well for us is you can get these big diapers. They come in different sizes. The key thing here is the M four. That’s a super thick diaper that tends to absorb more of the urine at night. If you have a better solution for how to solve this problem, please post me or DM me autism labs. You can go to and get information there about how to get ahold of me. That would really be helpful. Best of luck to you this week, and we’ll be back next week with some more information on both low tech and high tech solutions. For those folks that have profoundly or severely autistic individuals, see you.
