Plymouth Meeting Nonprofit Launches Autism App

KenCrest, a nonprofit based in Plymouth Meeting, has launched a free iPhone and iPad app for adolescents and adults with autism.

Created by a KenCrest speech pathologist, the Mi-Stories app allows autistic users access to a series of instructional videos designed to help them navigate sometimes difficult everyday social scenarios. The videos range from two to four minutes in length and sharpen communication and social skills by using modeling, social scripting, and visualization in business and informal contexts.

Autism—which the Center for Disease Control estimates affects 1 in 110 children—is characterized in part by a deficit of social intuition in the afflicted. KenCrest’s videos, and others of their kind, aim to instill through rote the behavior intuition would have informed.

The app is available here.

Now in its 106th year, KenCrest serves more than 8,000 children, youth and adults with developmental disabilities at 300 site locations in the five-county Philadelphia region and the state of Delaware each year. The Philadelphia Inquirer named KenCrest a “Top Work Places” for large companies in 2010. For more information about KenCrest, please call 610-825-9360 or visit www.kencrest.org. For more information on Mi-Stories™ visit www.mi-stories.org.