Challenges in future all-round digitalized ASD care services

Considering the estimated prevalence reported by recent studies on Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) and the heavy demand caused by ASD people on families and on educational, social, and medical services, there is a significant and increasing need for effective and efficient care strategies able not only to ensure that ASD persons achieve optimal outcomes and improve their quality of life, but also to support all involved professionals, families, caregivers, and social networks. The potential benefit of ICT- based approach in ASD treatment has been testified by recent literature results regarding, e.g., the exploitation of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) in assistive and cognitive rehabilitation tools. In this position paper we sketch our enlarged vision of ICT-based personalized continuous integrated ASD care services designed under a Socio-Technical (ST) approach and supporting not only ASD treatment but all involved stakeholders, their activities and needs, as well as the interaction among them. The resulting complexity of such overall ST system, the heterogeneity of its components in terms of activities, involved stakeholders, contexts of use (e.g., clinical setting, home setting, schools), and services (e.g., medical guidance, crisis management, real-time monitoring), as well as the necessity for an evolutionary vision of the system and its offered services, demand for a strong unifying conceptual tool around which all system aspects harmonize and cooperate in smart ways for achieving an individual-based continuous care service. In this paper we argue that the adoption of Digital Twin as unifying conceptual tool and its contamination and cooperation with Artificial Intelligence, and VR/AR technologies would be able to boost the achievement of such an ambitious goal, and we discuss possible benefits in typical scenarios related to ASD care (testing, rehabilitation/prosthetic intervention, prediction, crisis management).