MITA, Mental Imagery Therapy for Autism is a distinctive, early-intervention application for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder(ASD).
Mita by ImagiRation held 3 years clinical trial of 6454 children with Autism, and the language score has increased to a fair level i.e, 120% higher than in children with similar initial evaluations.
ImagiRation has developed a highly innovative adaptive language therapy application for children with autism. This digital medicine startup has links to Harvard, Boston University, and MITA.
One of the best-supported therapies for ASD is Pivotal Response Treatment(PRT) and MITA is based on the same.
Objective of MITA
It is to develop one of the four pivotal skills targeted by Pivotal Response Treatment, a child’s ability to notice and to acknowledge multiple cues presented simultaneously. Developing this ability has been shown to decrease stimulus over selectivity and most importantly, to lead to improvements in general learnings.
MITA is special because of several reasons, namely:
MITA makes it simple in interacting, a simple drag and drop mechanism makes it easy for toddlers and kids to touch and move objects.
Puzzles which are made by MITA are designed to help kids learn to mentally integrate multiple features of an object.
It is engaging and friendly, exercises are arranged into six fun themes with beautiful graphics that every child would love.
Engaging and Systematic approach
MITA emphasizes exercises that teach a child to attend to only one feature and which might be a color or size. Gradually the exercises get more difficult and then it requires the kids to focus on two features simultaneously, i.e both size and color.
For this, a child must learn to hold two pieces of information in their mind and make the decision considering both the combinations. After the child has practiced these then it reaches to tackling three features such as size, color, and shape and then eventually to puzzles that involve attending to an ever-increasing number of characteristics.
Through MITA’s systematic exercises, a child progresses and develops the ability to simultaneously attend to a greater number of features.
For understanding syntax, spatial prepositions, and verb tenses, The ability to mentally build an image based on a combination of multiple features is absolutely necessary.
MITA’s Development team
MITA has been developed by Dr. Andrey Vyshedskiy, a neuroscientist from Boston University; Rita Dunn, a Harvard University-educated specialist; John Elgarth, MIT educated; and other developers.
MITA, a digital medicine
MITA has been translated into over 12 languages and is available in over 100 countries.
MITA can become an essential tool of digital medicine for children with language delay.
In this era of Covid-19 speeding society transition into the realm of telemedicine and online therapies, digital medicine shows tremendous promise, when its application is given sufficient time and the ingenuity to perform outside the bounds of classic therapies.
