"My Remote Playmate: A Patient-monitoring Device for Autistic Children"

What good is a phone when the user is deaf? What good is remote contact with a pre-programmed robot when the person is autistic, and needs the physical contact with another human being and one-on-one care? This project is designed to illustrate the dangers of technological imperative by creating a well-designed, yet useless object using wireless networks. This was a warm-up project, thus, some of the design is mocked-up other than the primary effector/sensor. I have created a device that is made for a doctor to monitor an autistic child remotely, masquerading as a friend. The doctor can initiate conversations with the child whenever he desires to do so! He can simply turn on the auto-conversing mode--the computer will listen to the child and talk to him using a pre-programmed system--and the doctor can monitor the child's relationship with his surroundings. The device comes in the form of a watch or a doll in various colors! If your child was in such a situation where he needed 24-hour monitoring, would you really want a computer to do it? No. Should an autistic child be treated like some A/S computer fix-up service? No. The device may initiate conversations and let the doctor monitor the child, who knows if the child would even talk to the device? Even if he does engage in the device, it can not help the child to talk to other people or exchange deeper emotions--it may even cause the child to distance himself from being social with other people even more.

The up-side:
The doctor can monitor his autistic patient 24/7.

The down-side:
The device may never even get a reaction back from the child.
The machine may be of negative influence of the child since autistic children also tend to have Obsessive Compulsive Disorders.