Mother invents app to help autistic son

The app consists of a game for individuals with Autism and other special needs to recognize emotions to help improve social skills by recognizing the emotion, the cause behind the emotion and speedup recognition. It has great geography fun as well as the user takes train trips around the world.

Focused on a passenger train traveling to destinations around the world, the game requires players to match a specified emotion with the correct picture of the passenger's facial expression.

Autistic people have trouble understanding the difference between a smile and frown, and the emotions behind the expressions.

“The game is designed not only to help children with autism improve their emotion recognition, but better understand the meaning behind the expression and interpret expressions more quickly”, Therese Wantuch said.

"It helps them answer the question, 'Why are they happy or why are they sad?' " she said.

From her experience with her son, who was diagnosed at 18 months, Therese Wantuch said she knows firsthand the difference early intervention can make with children with autism.

"When he was diagnosed, we went all out," she said. "My husband went part-time with his job. We did all the programs. One was called floor time, and we spent at least 20 minutes a day just getting in his face and working with him on verbal skills."

The skills learned from Training Faces are paramount for children with autism to become more independent adults, she said.

"As the diagnosis of autism continues to go up, we need these folks to be independent," she said. "It's what gives them a fuller a life, and lets them get decent housing on their own and get a job so they're not sitting in Mommy and Daddy's family room their entire life. That's not fair to them or their family."

This games costs $2.99. A percentage of each download of the app goes to Autism charities.

Adapted from: https://usat.ly/2upNDUy

More info: http://apple.co/2tDjqmd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbqp1PYl56o