02 abr World Autism Awareness Day — Learn more about the Jade App
02/04/2019
About the World Autism Awareness Day
Today, April 2, is the World Autism Awareness Day. This date was established by the United Nations in 2008 to encourage society to have a greater understanding of the subject, thus creating a more favorable and prepared environment for the development of the autistic.
According to the UN, autism is a lifelong neurological condition that manifests itself in early childhood regardless of gender, race, or socioeconomic status. Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is mainly characterized by unique social interactions, non-standard forms of learning, strong interest in specific subjects, inclination to routines, difficulties in typical forms of communication, and particular ways of processing sensory information.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), autistic spectrum disorder affects one in 160 children in the world today. One of these children is Lucas, a 5-year-old boy who inspired his father, the entrepreneur Ronaldo Cohin, to create Jade, a startup that develops therapeutic games for cognitive disabilities.
Ronaldo Cohin and Lucas
Lucas was diagnosed as a high-functioning autistic at the age of two, after the family and teachers noticed some peculiarities in their behavior as little eye contact, little interaction and a lot of attachment to objects.
Learn about the types of autism:
The current criterion is based on functionality — the ability to perform simple activities and develop the intellect
- Low functionality: poorly interacting. In general, they repeat movements continuously and present mental retardation, which requires treatment for life.
- Medium functionality: classic autistic. They have difficulty communicating, they do not look in the eyes of others and repeat behaviors.
- High functionality (Lucas’s diagnosis): also called Asperger syndrome, have the same losses, but with a slight degree. They can study, work, form a family.
- Savant syndrome: about 10% belong to this category, marked by psychological deficits, but holders of an extraordinary memory.
After the diagnosis, Ronaldo and Amanda, Lucas’s mother, began to study the subject so that they could provide the child with a more favorable environment for his development. Based on this motivation and the whole study on ASD, Jade Autism, a game focused on the development of people with autism, was initially a subject of Ronaldo’s term paper in the course of Computer Science in 2017.
Lucas was very interested in electronic games, but Ronaldo realized that many applications had many restrictions on access to patients or did not provide information relevant to the treatment of children. Thus, Ronaldo decided to create a platform with a therapeutic profile, which uses games based on Glenn Doman Method for stimulus and cognitive development, memory and reasoning. While the child has fun, the platform reads user behavior in the background and generates reports, both performance and prognostics, that are used by therapists to trace the most critical points and the best options of patient treatment. The optimization of autism treatment through Jade represents gains for the child, family and therapists.
In addition to children with autism spectrum disorder, Jade can be used by any child in need of cognitive stimulation such as:
- Neurotypical Children
- Children with Down Syndrome
- Children with Attention Deficit Disorder, with or without Hyperactivity
- Children with any unspecified syndrome with cognitive impairment
Jade Autism APP’s home screen
About the startup and its application
Just 11 months after the completion of Ronaldo’s term paper, the Jade Autism APP has won 3 awards and has more than 16k users in several countries. Ronaldo’s project has become a startup, called JADE, which plans to create APPs for other types of treatments. Today JADE is also a company funded by BiotechTown in the Business Development Program.
Autism Awareness is for children, youth and adults with autism to have their rights guaranteed, freedom to develop and support for a full and productive life.
The Jade APP is free and available for download at:
For more information on JADE startup talk with us.
