Tech for tots
Infants and toddlers with developmental delays or disabilities need access to rehabilitation services early in their lives, but not all families have equal access to excellent care. One way to improve the quality of early intervention is to use family-centered care, an approach that includes the child’s family in decisions about the design of the services their child receives.
Natalie Parde, an assistant professor of computer science, is researching ways to improve the quality of early intervention rehabilitation services for infants and toddlers from racially and ethnically diverse and socially disadvantaged families.
The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration with Mary Khetani, an associate professor of occupational therapy at UIC, and brings together artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and rehabilitation science.
Parde and Khetani will develop a better assessment tool that will help intervention designers include the most relevant content for each child and personalize the experience for families for all backgrounds. The project seeks to increase families’ involvement and comfort level in multiple ways: by allowing families to voice concerns about racial climate, by collecting information that families already use and prefer, and by giving families the opportunity to use a conversational agent to navigate the assessment tool. Parde and Khetani hope their tool will offer families a customized, culturally relevant electronic option for family-centered care when children are going through very early interventions.
Parde, who is a member of the Natural Language Processing Laboratory, has been focused on developing innovative natural language processing solutions for healthcare applications, but typically for adults, especially older adult populations. Adding a new target audience — children — is exciting, she said. “This has been a dream collaboration so far,” Parde said. “I love working on projects with tangible real-world impact, and this project supplies that in spades.”