Mike Carr, a parent of a severely autistic adult, envisions AI “Doers” as transformative personal assistants. These advanced tools would seamlessly handle daily tasks, monitor health through wearables, and, for autistic individuals, analyze data to identify stressors, track positive experiences, and offer tailored insights. This innovation holds the potential to improve caregiving, enhance quality of life, and provide invaluable support to families like his.
The Future of AI for Autism and Its Potential to Improve the Lives of Parents with Autistic Children
Okay, so, being the parent of a child with profound autism? It’s… well, it’s a journey. Beautiful, challenging, exhausting, and sometimes, let’s just be honest, completely overwhelming. I spend a lot of time thinking – like, way too much time – about how technology could just, you know, make things a little bit easier. Not just the quick fixes, the apps that keep him occupied for five minutes, but real, meaningful solutions that actually make a difference. I have this dream, this kind of crazy vision, and I just had to share it with you. It’s about AI, and I genuinely think it could be a total game-changer for families like mine. And it’s closer than you might think! It’s all about real, practical help for the everyday struggles we all know so well.
The Doer: My Imaginary AI Best Friend (Seriously, I Need One)
Imagine an AI assistant that’s so much more than Siri or Alexa. Forget voice-activated searches; I’m talking about “The Doer”—an AI that goes beyond reminders and actually takes action. It anticipates what you need before you even realize it, handling all the little things that clutter up your day.
It’s not just about paying bills or scheduling appointments (though that would be great). It’s about seamlessly automating your life in ways that actually make sense for your family.
The Doer: Always One Step Ahead (A Parent Can Dream, Right?)
Picture this: Your AI Doer knows when a bill is due and just… takes care of it. No more late fees! It syncs with your calendar, checks your bank account, and boom—the bill is paid. Dental appointment coming up? No need to think about it. The AI sees a free slot on Friday and books it for you.
But it’s more than logistics. This AI is connected to you. It senses when you’re stressed, when you’re running on empty. With smartwatches and other wearables, it tracks your heart rate, blood pressure—those tiny changes that scream “overwhelmed!” And when it picks up on that, it steps in.
If your heart rate spikes, maybe it sends a text: “Hey, take a deep breath. Try the 4-7-8 breathing technique.” A small nudge that can make all the difference in the moment.
Real Help for Real Life (Because We Deserve It)
Think about all those daily tasks that drain your energy. Grocery shopping? The AI Doer handles it. It knows what’s running low, pulls up your favorite recipes (because meal planning is another task we don’t have time for), and orders exactly what you need—delivered right to your door.
What about the kids? Imagine your child has soccer practice. The AI knows the schedule, arranges transportation—maybe even a driverless car (seriously, how amazing would that be?)—and makes sure they get there safely. If practice is canceled, it adjusts automatically.
AI for Autism: This Could Change Everything (And I’m So Hopeful)
Now, let’s talk about how this could transform life for families with profoundly autistic children. My son is nonverbal, and sometimes understanding his world feels impossible. But AI could help bridge that gap.
Imagine an AI-powered system that tracks his day in real-time. A small, comfortable device—a necklace or wristband with a discreet camera—captures what he sees, hears, and experiences. If he has a meltdown (and they happen), the AI records the context. What triggered it? Who was there? What patterns are emerging? Finally, some clues!
This data, combined with wearables that track his vitals, paints a complete picture of his emotional and physical state. The AI learns to recognize patterns, anticipating stressors or even seizures before they happen. That kind of insight could change everything.
Building a Profile: Finally, Finally Understanding My Kid
It’s not just about tracking. The AI recognizes faces, voices, and activities, building a detailed profile of his day—moments of joy, frustration, excitement, and anxiety. Over time, it figures out what truly makes him happy and what causes distress.
Maybe it notices he always lights up when working on a certain puzzle or that he responds positively to a particular caregiver. It can help reinforce those positives. If he’s struggling, the AI can make suggestions—alternative activities, different sensory inputs, even adjusting the environment to make things easier for him. It’s not about judgment. It’s about using real data to improve communication and understanding. Imagine finally being able to see what’s working.
A Constant Cycle of Learning and Growing (Just Like We Are)
The best part? This AI doesn’t just collect data—it learns from it. If something is causing stress, it suggests alternatives. If a routine is working well, it reinforces it. It’s a feedback loop, constantly refining its understanding of your child’s unique needs.
At the end of the week, you get a report summarizing their activities, interactions, and emotional state. You can see what’s working and what isn’t, and the AI offers data-driven suggestions to improve their daily life.
The Long and Winding Road: Testing and Integration (Come Join Us!)
This might sound like science fiction, but the pieces are already out there—self-driving taxis, wearable health trackers, AI-powered cameras. We just need someone to connect the dots and bring it all together. That’s exactly what we’re working on at Autism Labs and J13 . We’re testing these technologies, figuring out what really works for families like ours, and putting it into action. It’s a long road, but we’re dedicated to making this happen.
A New Kind of Hope for Autism Families (And I Really Believe This)
I genuinely believe AI could make a real difference for families like mine. Not by replacing the love and care we give our kids—nothing could ever do that—but by giving us an extra hand. By helping us understand our children better. By easing some of the daily chaos and stress so we can focus on what matters most.
Just imagine having a clearer window into your child’s world—what makes them happy, what stresses them out, what helps them thrive. That’s what AI can do. And that’s why I’m so hopeful.
I’ll keep sharing updates on our journey at Autism Labs. More than anything, I’d love for you to be part of the conversation. Share your thoughts, your hopes, your struggles. We’re all in this together.
Let’s connect. You can reach me at mike@autismlabs.com. Looking forward to hearing from you!
Transcript
Mike Carr (00:05):
Well, this week we’ve got a pretty cool topic that I want to talk to you about how AI will improve your and your autistic child’s life. So two weeks ago on episode two of season four, I talked about using four of the LLMs, the more popular LLMs to answer a couple fairly simple prompts. But today I want to talk about something that’s far more exciting, and it’s an integration of technology that is almost here. Actually, all the pieces are there, the system isn’t yet in place, and I follow a variety of AI futurists. So if you’re interested in who’s talking about this kind of stuff and where I’m getting some of these ideas, Paul Roter and Mike Kaput are two guys that have a podcast called the Artificial Intelligence Show. So if you just go out and search artificial intelligence show, you find ’em, I think they’re entertaining and they do a weekly podcast.
(00:58):
Shelly Palmer has a website, shelly palmer.com, and he puts out a daily little blurb on the most recent developments in the AI space. Then there’s a newsletter I get called the AI Break, the AI Break by Louis & Rui Sousa, and it’s sort of interesting. They highlight some of the newest agents and apps that are out there. And then lastly, a Stanford professor, Andrew Ng NG is his last name. So it’s andrewng.org. What I like about Andrew is he puts together some courses that explain the basics of AI, how it actually works. And so if you’re not real technical and you just want to get a sort of a foundational understanding of what this AI thing is all about and how to use it, he’s a great person to start with. So what I want to do today though is talk about Doers and a Doer.
(01:44):
Instead of an Alexa or a Siri, think about having an AI Doer and the Doers, your AI helper. And lemme just give you some ideas. And some of this isn’t specific to profound autism, but I’ll get into that. So it’s going to know when certain bills come up to be paid, I’ll just pay ’em for you, right? Because it’s going to have access to your calendar. Now, you’re going to have to turn on and give this Doer all your online life. You’re going to have to get access to your text, your emails, your stream calls, like this one, your voicemail, phone calls, zoom calls, anything that you do using the internet, you’re going to have to trust it. And of course, it’ll be set up to maintain the confidentiality that you’re after. So I’ll have access to all this, but think about what it’s going to be able to do.
(02:30):
This is what is so exciting to pay all your bills, your dental appointment’s coming up for your teeth cleaned. You’ll just do it. It’ll check your calendar. It’ll figure out you an open slot. Oh yeah, you prefer to have on a Friday afternoon, and it’ll schedule the next dental appointment for Friday afternoon. And so it’s going to go through your life and do all this stuff. And if it senses your stress, now you think, how’s it going to know you’re stressed? Well, there are devices like this Apple smartwatch coming out, and maybe even this can do some of this. And they’re going to measure your vitals or measure four vitals and measure your perspiration. So when you tend to get stressed and when your severely autistic child tends to get stressed or they’re fixing to have a seizure, they often will perspire. Often their heart rate will go up as well, at least our sons does.
(03:14):
So it’ll monitor his heart rate as yours, monitor your heart rate, you’ll monitor your respiration through your oxygen saturation in your blood. So it’ll be able to measure how O2 saturated your blood is. And if you start having a lot of shallow breaths because you’re getting nervous for upset or stress, sometimes that affects the O2 level, so it’ll be able to sense that. And then of course, just blood pressure. Your blood pressure going through the roofing, you blow a gasket, right? So if you couple the data, the vital statistics that’re coming from your wristwatch, and of course if you’re profoundly autistic child won’t wear this thing like ours, you put it on their ankle and it works okay on their ankle too. Capture this data and then it’ll integrate it with some of the other things it’s going to do. It’s going to create some pretty cool stuff.
(03:58):
So let me back up. So if it senses that you’re having a meltdown or that you need to sort of take it easy on your computer screen, it might send you a text, it might talk to you if you’ve got the audio activated. And it’ll say something like, Hey, practice your breathing. Do the 4 7 8 breathing methodology, which I listened about on a podcast recently. And the gal was talking about how you breathe in for four seconds, you hold it for seven seconds, and then you breathe out for eight seconds. And if you do that three times in a row, it triggers a automatic autonomous nervous system relaxation response. And I tried it and it actually works. And so AI might suggest things like that to calm you down if it senses that you’re sort of losing it. And then for your spouse, it’ll do the grocery list now is only going to do the grocery list, right?
(04:47):
It’s going to order the groceries, it’s going to have them delivered to your doorstep. You don’t have to mess with it, right? It’s going to know when your refrigerator’s running low, it’s going to automatically order the groceries, change the menu up. Maybe it’ll ask you if you want it to, Hey, does this look like a good menu? And then it figures out what’s needed. It orders, the stuff shows up at your doorstep, it won’t yet unload your groceries, which I know is a real pain. But I think that’s sort of interesting to think about what it could do. It also can do some other pretty cool things. One of the things that’s going on in Austin, Texas right now are these driverless taxis, Waymo’s, and they’re all over the place. I saw three yesterday when I was driving around, and they literally, I think it’s through Uber or Lyft right now.
(05:28):
You can order one of these things. They show up at your doorstep. There’s no driver. You hop in the car and you’re off. So think about this with your kids, your Doer, your AI assistant has access to the school’s calendar. It knows what extracurricular activities your kids are in. It’ll schedule a Waymo to take them from school, and classes are out to whatever football, soccer or ballet, et cetera they’re in. If there’s a change in the schedule, it will monitor the schedules posted by the coaches or the teachers. It will know that, okay, you’re going to a different place today. This can all be automated and all handled for you with the Doer concept. So let’s talk about your profoundly autistic child, because a lot of these kiddos are nonverbal. Our son is nonverbal, as I’ve talked about before. And so we don’t like to be guessing when we don’t really know what’s going on.
(06:20):
But with a Doer with ai, there’s some pretty cool things that can start to happen. It’s going to require though the integration of one more thing. And you’re going to think this is sci-fi stuff, but it’s not. He’s going to have a necklace on, or in our son’s case, he’s going to have a little chest strap on. Now, this is my jogging chest strap, but it’s the same idea. It’ll be very comfortable. It’ll be clear plastic or something, so you won’t even notice it, and it’ll have a little HD camera instead of this polar sensor, it’ll have a camera and it will record throughout the day, everything that your son sees, everything that your son hears, everything that your son or daughter says, and who they’re interacting with. And then it’s going to integrate all that video, audio content with the data that’s coming off the watch in terms of the vitals.
(07:13):
And paint a picture of, okay, well, what activities created stress or consternation today? It can look at that segment of video. Who was he interacting or she interacting with? Because it’ll have built-in facial recognition, audio recognition. It’s going to know who or she was with, where they were, what they were doing, what set them off, or what were they doing when they were having fun, and how many times that day did they have fun? And you’ll start to learn things. It can listen, right? Our son makes, he doesn’t really talk, but when he’s upset, he makes certain sounds or he repeats certain phrases and we sort of know he’s getting upset. When he’s happy, he tends to laugh more or he tends to whistle. And so if you know Michael’s whistling, he’s having a good day, he’s enjoying whatever he is doing, but you’re not there.
(08:04):
So throughout the day, you’re Doer, you’re AI assistant is in this, the video’s being recorded, what your son’s seeing, what your daughter’s seeing, the audio’s being recorded, the vitals are being recorded. It’s going to know at the end of the day, well, how many times did he have a good time? What was he doing when he had a good time? What was he? Who was he with? What stressed him out? And so it’s going to build this profile. Now, this is where it gets even cooler. It’s then going to be able to make suggestions on how to improve the things that provide fun and joy. And it’s going to monitor with hard objective data if its suggestions are being followed by whomever’s with your son or daughter throughout the day. And so it’s this idea that you’re going to have this feedback loop. It’s going to monitor, watch, and assess first what’s going on.
(08:58):
Building this profile after a few weeks of data, it’s going to have a pretty good idea. What activities, what puzzles, what things are great, when are they great? When are they not working well? Which individuals interact with your son or daughter in a more positive way? And it’s not so much to evaluate people or activities, it’s to provide everyone with the data and the feedback and even the suggestions on, we’ll try this or use this prompt or try this puzzle or offer these two things as choices. You as a parent at the end of the week are going to get a report, right? Well, how many times during the week was an activity providing on a level nine or 10 on a scale of one to 10, super fun, super exciting, super energizing. How many activities were ones or twos? What were those activities? What does my Doers suggest change?
(09:51):
Were those suggestions followed? And the Doers also going to monitor if they weren’t followed? Well, then let me make a different suggestion. It’s going to try to prompt and encourage different people to interact with your son or daughter in different ways based upon past behavior to sort of improve their interactions. And all this data is captured consistently and objectively having to write anything down, right? No one’s having to enter something into an app. It’s all captured because the video’s always on. The audio’s always being recorded. And your do is parsing that, listening to what your son or daughter is hearing, listening to what they’re saying or what sounds they’re making, and then creating this sort of profile. And if they’re having a bad day, it’s going to know that too. It’s going to understand pretty quickly. Well, they’re not completing tasks quite as quickly. I don’t hear that whistle.
(10:43):
I don’t hear those joyous sounds. The camera on the strap is sort of down facing downward, indicating that their posture isn’t sort of up and energized and vibrant. And it can provide then an alert, right? It can alert the colleague or the staff or the team or the teacher. Hey, your son or daughter is a little off today. You may want to check on them. Pulse is a little elevated perspiration, noticing some of that. If they are seizure prone, maybe it’s a precursor to a seizure. So take some action and be ready for it. If they’re not seizure prone, then do some things that maybe get them headed back on the right track. Now, this might sound like sci-fi stuff. Now. I don’t think there’s any way this is going to work, right? All the technology, every individual piece that I’ve described is available today.
(11:33):
Some of it is actually being implemented, like the Waymo’s that I talked about in Austin. And I think there’s also being tested in San Francisco or one or two of other cities in the country. It’s working right now. I mean, these things are driving all around, all over the city without any drivers. And so think about it, it’s not a big step to integrate that with your kid’s schedule. So now all of a sudden they’re picking your kids up from school, taking ’em where they need to go, bringing ’em home and all that kind of stuff. So the individual pieces are there. What’s lacking, I think, are the systems. But the dream is the dream that we have at Autism Labs and that our sister, nonprofit, J13, John13, has with a day program and a respite program to residential, is to start to integrate some of this technology to start to test pieces, to start to build these systems, to see if we can move the needle.
(12:19):
And I’m sure some of the things I’ve described aren’t going to work quite as well as maybe you hoped for others though might work better and be easier to implement. So from time to time, I’ll have a podcast episode that sort of talks about where we’re at on this journey, what things have we tried, what’s worked down to the nitty gritty as to which LLMs, which specific AI solutions are we using, you using them? And where do we hope to go from here? So this whole idea though, is it’s going to make your life easier. It’s certainly going to make your severely autistic child’s life easier, and you’re going to have the hard data, not just these subjective things, to know that hey, everything’s headed in the right direction, and it’s going to have this internal feedback loop. I started talking about this measures it, assesses it, tweaks, it then provides some new instruction, some new guidance, and then it reassesses, right?
(13:14):
So it’s constantly trying to look at those numbers on a daily basis or on a weekly basis and get the number of joyful incidents up and hopefully reduce those things that cause consternation or frustration or angst. So stay tuned and if you have any comments, if you are aware of folks that do this already, please email me. My email address is mike@autismlabs.com. I’ll be happy to respond to you and have a conversation with what you know and maybe even have you on the podcast so you can share with other folks that watch this podcast, some of the cool things that you’re aware of. Until next week, have a great one. See you.
