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Autistic led technology still has to be co-designed, a Melbourne panel heard
In short
At the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne, a panellist argued that user centred design is everything in autism technology, and three founders described how they bring their users into the build.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
The first panellist to answer on the technology panel at the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne opened with a definition and a warning. Tism tech, the panellist said, is technology for an autistic community of 75 million people worldwide, probably more. Autistic led means autistic entrepreneurs leading the building of those solutions, and the reason for it is that user centred design is everything, so that a product actually meets the needs of the community.
That population figure is higher than the most recent global estimate. Six months after the symposium, in December 2024, the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021 autism collaborators reported in The Lancet Psychiatry that an estimated 61.8 million people worldwide were autistic in 2021, about one in every 127 people. The panellist had offered 75 million as a figure that was probably an undercount.
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Sources the story draws on
- The global epidemiology and health burden of the autism spectrum: findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021 (opens in a new tab), The Lancet Psychiatry (GBD 2021 Autism Spectrum Collaborators; summary page by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation)
- Women's Health: NIH Has Increased Its Efforts to Include Women in Research (GAO/HEHS-00-96) (opens in a new tab), GAO, United States (published on govinfo.gov)
- Voluntary AI safety standard (opens in a new tab), Commonwealth of Australia (record on Analysis and Policy Observatory)
- The 10 guardrails (Voluntary AI Safety Standard) (opens in a new tab), Australian Government (industry.gov.au)
- How neurodiverse social app Kaboose is expanding its global footprint (opens in a new tab), SmartCompany (Morganne Kopittke)
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