Clasp, Health Internet of Things, is an eighteen-month research partnership between an agile technology innovation team from Lancaster University, Autism Initiatives, Lancashire County Council, and other organisations working with people with autism such as Dream Lancashire. We are based at the School of Computing and Communications and work across departments including Design, Chemistry and Health and Medicine.
We are developing a platform to support the design and development of personalised anxiety management technologies for people with autism and their support network. The platform is to be designed for use in personalised digital care with applications beyond autism. We adopt a modular approach to design. In this way tools can be designed and built to suit individual needs by choosing different shapes, materials and functionalities, and have them locally manufactured thorugh existing 3DP distributed networks.
Our work builds on our previous research in anxiety management conducted as part of the Access ASD project in partnership with ASD adults which resulted in the development of ‘Clasp’, a tactile anxiety management and peer support network system, comprising a number of customisable components. Clasp has received wide media attention (e.g. check this episode of BBC Click), support from end-users and care-providers, the findings and the agile, participatory approach taken have been widely published.
Our research seeks to move beyond mass-produced ‘health-gadgets’ and investigates the long-term societal implications of personalised health technology where the functionalities and the physical properties of a system can be customised and locally manufactured, whilst the data captured is curated it by its own users rather than a corporation. Clasp is funded by the Engineering and Physics Research Council (EPRSC) .
The short video below provides a brief overview of Access ASD and Clasp early development process.
