Sreemoyee Chatterjee
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Written By: Sreemoyee Chatterjee | Published : October 3, 2018 4:04 PM IST
This AI program will help children with learning difficulties © Shutterstock
Technology has helped in miraculous discoveries across all fields and your child's learning difficulties are no exceptions as well. A group of researchers has come up with a unique machine learning technology that can now help detect the clusters of learning difficulties that make lives tough for children at school with health conditions like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism or dyslexia.
A computer algorithm was fed with cognitive testing data that included measures of listening skills, spatial reasoning, problem solving and memory, thanks to these researchers from the University of Cambridge. This data enabled the algorithm to highlight the four clusters of difficulties in which the children best fit into including difficulties with working memory skills and difficulties with processing sounds in words. The other challenging areas were broad cognitive difficulties in many spaces, stated a recent media report. The study analysed 550 children who are struggling at school and has been published in the journal, Developmental Science.
"By looking at children with a broad range of difficulties we found unexpectedly that many children with difficulties with processing sounds in words don't just have problems with reading - they also have problems with math," reportedly said lead author Duncan Astle from the university.
According to the media report, he added: "We need to move beyond the diagnostic label and we hope this study will assist with developing better interventions that more specifically target children's individual cognitive difficulties."
The study has associated short-term memory retention that includes working memory and manipulation of information with struggling with math and with tasks like following lists. The researchers have linked difficulties which relate to phonological skills that includes processing sounds in words to struggling with reading.
According to the researchers, the study has included children with all difficulties regardless of diagnosis of ADHD, autism and dyslexia in order to capture the range of difficulties within, and overlap between, the diagnostic categories.
