RUNNER UP

weSYNC By thisisnoel

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder have rigid schedules and work with several different people on a daily basis. Doctors, therapists, and teachers may communicate with the child's parent regarding their care, but not necessarily with one another.

weSYNC has set out to change this. weSYNC is an application for the iPad, iPhone, and Web, that creates a specialized profile for the autistic individual by gathering knowledge from each caregiver and establishing a centralized location where it can be accessed and edited by everyone. Establishing a dialogue among doctors, therapists, teachers and parents allows them to share information and reinforce one another's efforts.

What are the Benefits?- Highlights the unique strengths, abilities, and challenges of each child - Streamlines goals across caregivers and tracks achievements - Recognizes the individual and collective efforts of the caregivers - Alleviates pressure on parent to be primary messenger of information - Tracks and notifies caregivers of recent achievements - Empowers caregivers to make informed decisions regarding care - Creates an overall consistency in the child's care and life—aspiring to help them progress faster.

The Autism Connects technology and design competition challenged students to help individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to better connect with the world around them and allow individuals who do not have ASD to better understand and connect with those who do by combining technological and creative solutions. This international student competition brought together a distinguished jury panel across disciplines including Yves Behar (fuseproject), Lisa Strausfeld (Pentagram), Richard Seymour (Seymourpowell) and our own Allan Chochinov (Core77). The Jury grand prize winner will be awarded $5000 and the top three designs will receive a $1,000 stipend and registration fees to attend the 2011 International Meeting for Autism Research, to be held May 12 to 14, 2011 in San Diego, CA, where they will be invited to present their design concept. We will be profiling all of the winners in anticipation of next week's conference. See the full list of winners here.