Tool for Evaluating the Effectiveness of the DENVER Protocol

Condition(s) studied

Study summary

Early remediation of the communicative and social difficulties of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is central. However, from the age of 6-8 months, children with ASD show a lack of attention to social stimuli such as faces: such early avoidance behavior could be at the root of later communicative difficulties (language, attention). The Denver program aims to stimulate social communication and attention to faces in children with ASD aged between 18 and 60 months. Although the Denver protocol is currently recommended by the French National Authority for Health (HAS), the Denver protocol has not yet been widely used or evaluated in France, mainly due to a lack of tools adapted to non-verbal populations. The goal of FaceCom is to help clinicians to evaluate the efficiency of the Denver Protocol.

Eligibility

Primary outcome measure(s)

• looking time during natural social scenes — measure of 10 minutes :once for the ASD control and TD control groups. Repeated 4 times (every 3 months) for the ASD Experimental group
  Looking time in natural interaction situations is measured by recording the direction and time of the child's gaze at faces and objects in real social scenes using a video camera. The recording is then viewed by experimenters and manually coded frame by frame (sampling frequency 25 frames/second), determining which areas of interest (face, object) are looked at by the child at each time step. This measurement is less precise than the following one, but enables us to assess these children's social skills in real scenes of adult/child interaction (PART 1 of the data collection).
• looking time to social scenes presented on a screen — measure of 10 minutes :once for the ASD control and TD control groups. Repeated 4 times (every 3 months) for the ASD Experimental group
  Looking time during the viewing of social scenes presented on a screen is measured using an eye-tracking system, suitable for studying populations as young as 3 months. The eye-tracker is a device used to measure very precisely (x and y spatial coordinates at a temporal sampling frequency of around 30 Hertz) where the child's gaze rests and for how long in a 2D social scene presented on screen (PART 2 of data collection). These data are collected automatically by the eye tracker (spatial coordinates at each time step) and then coded into areas of interest (gaze locations: eyes, mouth...).

Trial sites (3)

More University Hospital, Grenoble trials in France

Other trials for the same condition