YouTube could soon be used by Doctors to diagnose autism an article in King 5 Health claims.
Research conducted by Stanford University School of Medicine shows that the social media, featuring a myriad of home videos could be a powerful tool which is now underused for diagnosis and identifuying tell tale traits like Stimming, repetitive behaviour and lack of eye contact.
There is no standardised diagnostic tool worldwide for diagnosis at this point in time, with average diagnosis age being around eight years old. With only brief training research assistants at Stanford could spot behavioural traits of autism directly by watching YouTube home videos of the child.
Dr Dennis Wall PhD said:
“Our new paper supports the hypothesis that we can detect autism quickly in very short home videos with high accuracy. For instance, we could use this system for clinical triage, as a way to channel traffic so that children can get the kind of attention they need as early as possible.”
The benefits of using Youtube for diagnosis are both clinical and cost effective – it could save families thousands in travelling and evaluation costs by paediatricians and experts.