If you could read my mind

Parents of children who can’t speak or gesture understand why a device that decodes likes and dislikes by measuring brain activity ranks as one of the 25 Ideas That Are Changing the World in a Toronto Life Magazine feature this December. Idea number eight is an optical brain imaging system developed at Bloorview that decodes preference – with the ultimate goal of opening the world of choice to children who can’t speak or move. Wearing a headband...

Read More

In the trenches

Mothers of teens and adults with autism are as stressed out as combat soldiers, according to a study published in The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders and reported yesterday on the New York Times Motherlode blog. Researchers followed a group of mothers and their children for eight days, interviewing moms at the end of each day and on four days measuring hormone levels associated with stress. They found the level of chronic stress...

Read More

My son's riches

I call them angels. Exceptional people who have been drawn to work with my son Ben and who have surpassed all expectations. There’s a long line of workers. ‘Worker’ is a misnomer and inadequate to describe those who have been teachers, visionaries, therapists and coaches in their own right. There was Kathleen, a bouncy, bubbly young woman who spent six years with Ben – transforming herself into a speech therapy, technology, sign language,...

Read More

A cross-country quest for therapy

In 2006, Stacey and Jonathan H. uprooted their family from Ontario – where they had family and friends and Jonathan worked as a teacher – to Calgary, a province Stacey had never visited. The year before, their twins Will and Owen, 2, were diagnosed with severe autism and they were still on a wait list for publicly-funded applied behaviour analysis (ABA) therapy. The family moved west in the hopes of getting co-ordinated, provincially funded ABA...

Read More

This and that

This post is a mixed bag.Saturday was the first night we went trick-or-treating with Ben in a wheelchair. We used to pull him around in a wagon (because he’s tiny), and he would hobble up the stairs to people’s doors or we would carry him on our backs.But this year it made sense to use his new wheelchair, which he now uses whenever he’s out.It was an eye-opener to realize how many homes were inaccessible, with two to three steps up to the path, and...

Read More