Two articles from Disability Scoop...
Despite an uptick in the number of hate crimes reported across the nation, new federal figures suggests that fewer targeted people with disabilities.
Data released this week from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program indicates that there were 88 reported hate crime offenses during 2015 related to disability bias. That's down from 95 the previous year.
The decline in disability-related cases comes as the FBI indicated that the total number of hate crimes rose. Overall, the agency documented 5,850 incidents last year.
Among hate crime victims, 1.2 percent were people with disabilities, the FBI said. In 52 cases, the offenses were motivated by a person's physical disability while 36 involved those with mental disabilities.
The FBI tracks the number of crimes prompted by disability as well as race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, gender and gender identity.
The statistics are based on reports collected by nearly 15,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide.
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A smartphone app could dramatically speed up the process of screening children for autism, potentially offering feedback in less than a minute.
Using eye-tracking technology, researchers say that they can determine with nearly 94 percent accuracy if a child as young as 2 is displaying signs of autism.
The findings come from a study looking at 32 kids ages 2 to 10, half of whom were previously diagnosed with the developmental disorder.
The app works by monitoring a child's eye gaze while they view pictures of social scenes.
Those on the spectrum have a scattered gaze, while typically-developing kids are more focused, the researchers said.
"The beauty of the mobile app is that it can be used by parents at home to assess the risk of whether a child may have ASD," according to Wenyao Xu of the University at Buffalo who worked on the study which was presented last month at the IEEE Wireless Health conference at the National Institutes of Health.
"This can allow families to seek therapy sooner, and improve the benefits of treatment," Xu said.
In addition to being accessible for families, the app-based screening is also quick, taking no more than 54 seconds, and does not present language barriers, the researchers said.
Though promising, however, the app is not quite ready for prime time.
"Right now it is a prototype. We have to consider if other neurological conditions are included, like ADD, how that will affect the outcome," said Kun Woo Cho, an undergraduate computer science and engineering major at the University at Buffalo who is the study's principle author.
Additional research on the app is expected to involve 300 to 400 kids.
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