Development of a Digitalized Bangla Autism Assessment System in Bangladesh

Introduction

The prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder is said to be increasing exponentially over the years possibly due to various bio psychosocial and environmental factors. Thus prompt holistic initiatives for early diagnosis and timely appropriate interventions. However, there is a dearth of resources, especially culturally adapted and validated cost-effective tools and trained professionals in low- and middle-income countries. This multi-staged mixed method study was conducted from 2018 to 2020. The first stage was the translation and adaptation of the scale in Bengali through stepwise: forward translation, backward translation, expert committee review, and pretesting. A mobile application and website was developed, in the second stage, following user centered designing principles. In the third stage, the usefulness of the mobile application and psychometric properties of the scale were assessed with 100 children from two special education schools in the Dhaka. The diagnostic accuracy was measured against the diagnosis and severity assessment of a multi-disciplinary team using Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).