Can autism really be detected by voice alone?
The Lena System, a home device that records 16 hours of audio from a toddler's shirt pocket, appears to predict autism in children as young as 24 months with 91 percent accuracy.
(Credit: Lena Foundation)The Lena Foundation, whose new autism-screening tool hit the market in September, claims that parents who use the Lena System are now able to determine with 91 percent accuracy whether their child is developing normally, has autism, or has unassociated language delays.
The home kit, which includes a digital audio recorder, an outfit to hold the recorder, and a questionnaire about the child's development thus far, costs $699. (The one-time language and autism screen, on the other hand, is $200.) The foundation, which develops technology for the screening of several types of language delays and disorders, says the kit works for children as young as 24 months.
"Roughly speaking, autistic children vocalize differently from other children," Dongxin Xu, manager of software and language engineering at the Lena Foundation, tells MIT's Technology Review.
Analyzing a child's vocal patterns to screen for autism isn't new. The three factors that seem to set the Lena System apart from traditional screening methods are portability (the recording device is small); amount of data (16-hour recordings); and the software Lena uses to analyze the recordings parents mail in dutifully each month.
According to Jeffrey Richards, a statistician and database technician for the Lena Foundation, the software first categorizes the 16-hour audio stream into sound types, such as child, parent, or television. The child clips are then further dissected, and analyzed for the phonological composition of each sound, as well as how it is clustered and paired. The resulting data is then compared with the data compiled on children who are considered normal, autistic, or delayed.
The 91 percent accuracy is high, and while Lena researchers continue to fine-tune their software to push that rate even higher, I remain somewhat skeptical that voice alone can determine whether a child is autistic. It is often suggested that Einstein didn't speak until he was at least 3, if not 4 or 5; I have to wonder how a 16-hour recording of Einstein at 24 months would be interpreted by Lena software.
Elizabeth Armstrong Moore is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. She has contributed to Wired magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and public radio. Her semi-obscure hobbies include unicycling, slacklining, hula-hooping, scuba diving, billiards, Sudoku, Magic the Gathering, and classical piano. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
"as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music. " http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13489714
It is quite possible that Einstein was himself Autistic.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2988647.stm
One lecturer on Autism once joked, "When I give a talk at a college I look around the audience and try to spot the people who are autistic. When I give a speach at an engineering college, I try to spot the people who aren't."
danielwsmithee was right, Einstein could've been diagnosed if he was born today... and we may have hindered him for it. ballmerisanape is right also... you can't really define autism as anything, but rather group people together as having similar traits.
An autistic person may have a vocal pattern that is similar to other people with autism. But there is certainly an element of over-diagnosis these days. The most important thing one eventually realizes is that there is nothing wrong with being autistic; it may not fit our society or lifestyle, but everyone is different.
It's incorrect to say that we "are all on [the autism spectrum] somewhere". The three ASD disorders are narrowly defined within the class of Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD). Each have specific medical diagnosis. The vast majority of people in the world do not have PDD, and therefore cannot be "in the spectrum" somewhere.
If Einstein had PDD at all, he might be diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. He would NOT be diagnosed with Autism by modern standards.
Please read more thoroughly the DSM-IV or any serious litterature on the subject. Or browse the screening tests developped by Simon Baron-Cohen at Cambridge. It's hard to see any "narrowly defined" concepts there.
As the father of a teenager recently diagnosed with Asperger, I can testify that diagnosing this disorder is certainly not "hard fact" science. Furthermore, traits related to autism, like repetitive movements and eye contact avoidance, tend to disappear when Asperger or high-functioning autists without retardation grow up.
As a matter of fact, most of the traits that lead to my son's diagnosis are shared by most men in my family, over 3 generations. Nobody has a diagnosis. Most didn't need it. You need a diagnosis when you need help. This is certainly the case of profound autists - a tragedy for the kid and the parents, but I do believe that most Aspergers can adapt to the society and live happy without much help.
About Einstein, unfortunately we can't administer him any test. But from what I know of his bio, it's very plausible that he could have been diagnosed with some disorder on the autism spectrum. Being slow to learn language, though, is more typical of high-functioning autism (a la Temple Grandin) than Asperger. Some Asperger kids learn to speak very early (my son). Unfortunately the off button could be hard to find.
About the article and the screening or diagnosis kit, I'd like to emphasize these points:
(1) A voice with a lack of inflections can characterize other disorders, like schizophrenia and some mood disorders. I don't know if early onsets of these disorders include voice characteristics, though.
(2) A false positive or a diagnosis for a mild condition can be worse than no diagnosis at all. It can induce distress for the relatives and the kid himself where there wasn't.
(3) Throwing a statistic like 91% (why not 90,5%?) for such ill-defined disorders shows some lack of seriousness.
So I remain skeptical.
91% accuracy, but you're skeptical? It's 91% percent flippin' accuracy already.
The Einstein mind is one out of many thousands, and might well be missed. Who cares...91% chance of correct early dx of autism is amazing.
More of the autism silly season is evidenced by the notion that autism can be detected by a voice analysis. There are no accepted measures of validity of this technique or anything like it. And, the 91% accuracy claim means nothing. It is a puzzle how such a number could be arrived at. What is the standard? The really important statistic, the false positive rate, is missing--although I'm sure there's a proprietary unpublished study done by the developers. If we accept that autism actually occurs in 1 in 150 kids, then a false positive rate of even just 2% means that more kids will be labeled with autism with than actually have it. That is, out of every 300 kids, 2 will have autism and 6 will be false positives. Even a tiny 0.5% false-positive rate means that over one-third of the sample are false positives. It would be a statistical miracle for a test such as this, even if it worked, to have a false positive rate in the 0.5-2% range. Thus, we're actually talking about a test that would label many times more kids with autism than would actually have it.
Who sells something like this without testing its effectiveness? If it wasn't autism, where anything goes, doing such a thing would not be tolerated.
The people most likely to use this are people who already have concerns about their child's development. Perhaps there is a lack of 'typical' social interaction or maybe the child's prosody is 'off' or any number of other red flags of developmental issues or delay. The point is, this test is simply a diagnostic tool to help figure out what special assistance the child need, if any.
As for your concerns about the validity of their screen or the results, they provide PDFs that seem to address them: http://www.lenababy.com/DownloadFile.aspx/pdf/Automated_Detection_of_ASD & http://www.lenababy.com/DownloadFile.aspx/pdf/Accuracy_For_ASD_Screens_vs_LAS .
But never mind that. We all know that it has become perfectly OK to do anything whatsoever to families affected by autism--especially if it involves separating desperate parents from their money for "revolutionary" new methods that turn out to be ineffective but expensive larks at best, like swimming with dolphins, or dangerous shams like facilitated communication and holding therapy. The market is now flooded with assessments as well, most of which only seems to work because they are selectively applied to kids who are already exhibiting lots of odd behavior. Are the people sold this expensive system being told that the results would not be accepted by a competent therapist or treatment center, and that they would have to go and pay even more money for a well-researched, standardized autism assessment? We also know that if the condition is autism, it is perfectly OK to rush a treatment or assessment onto the market before it has any general acceptance in the field, and before it has been subjected to real, independent testing. It was not long ago that such behavior was not considered professional or ethical. Nowadays, as we see here, it is standard practice.
I might suggest an evening course in journalism.
- by hayesjohn September 17, 2009 8:44 PM PDT
- Personally, I find it all to hard to believe that it is possible to monitor the effectiveness of how well an intervention is working with the system. I just don't believe that testing ( which starts at 24 months ) will be able to tell the difference month by month .
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(28 Comments)Doesn't that imply the ability to tell the age of a child by voice? Where are the standards that reflect month by month development of communication skills ? Is it assumed to be straight line growth for every child? Don't children do everything in spurts ? Good months the intervention is working,bad months it isn't ?
Sounds more like magic wrapped up in technology .