To measure and track autism inpatients’ aggressive behavior and associated physiological indicators, Goodwin turned to a colleague at Spring Harbor Hospital in southern Maine: Matthew Siegel, a child psychiatrist and associate professor of psychiatry and pediatrics of Tufts Medical School, who directs the hospital’s inpatient treatment center for children with autism. Siegel co-conceived their project and oversees data collection. Project funders include the Department of Defense, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative, and the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation.
Goodwin, Siegel, and their colleague Carla Mazefsky at the University of Pittsburgh launched a study in which inpatients with autism ages 7 to 18 wear a wristband with biosensors that monitor peripheral physiological signals—heart rate, sweat production, skin surface temperature, physical activity—and track their changes before, during, and after aggressive outbursts. At Northeastern, a team of experts in machine learning, data science, and health informatics are creating algorithms to automatically process this data. As of April, their algorithm predicted outbursts three minutes in advance with greater than 95 percent accuracy.