“It‘s trying to address the challenge in a very future-directed way.”

Talking Frankl with autism education specialist Craig Smith

On Friday I had the pleasure of chatting with Craig Smith about his views on Frankl. Craig runs The Universal Sandpit and works as a consultant for organisations fostering better education for people with Autism Spectrum Disorder. He is also national coordinator for Positive Partnerships, an autism education consortium. Here’s a snapshot of our conversation.

ELISE: Craig, for everyone’s benefit can you tell us a little bit about your background and your area of expertise?

CRAIG: So I’ve worked in autism education for about 14 years now. I’ve worked in schools for children with autism and I’ve co-ordinated schools for children with autism. I’ve been part of national teams looking at different ways of educating others about autism. Ive had opportunities to work with those in the technology field, for example with Apple as part of their accessibility work. I’ve been very interested in the interplay of technology and children with autism and their families — and the outcomes that we can see in that space.

ELISE: You mentioned to Jon that the Frankl whitepaper was one of the most exciting things you’d read about in a long time!

CRAIG: Yes absolutely. I’m very interested in the availability and the accessibility of cognitive assessments. In autism education we often rule them out — I mean we rule out their value sometimes just because it’s so hard to get a good reading on children. They go into the office to have a cognitive assessment and they’re in an uncomfortable environment; they’re very unused to the space. And so it’s very difficult to get a good reading on them and it’s very hard to use that information well.

I thought Frankl was written up in a way that tried to address the challenge in a way I hadn’t previously seen. It was great to read that and great to be part of ongoing dialogues in this space.

ELISE: What do you think a platform like the one we’re developing will bring to the education of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder?

CRAIG: I think anything that allows families to have easier access to quality assessments is going to yield positive results. I think one of the barriers at the moment is the expense of assessments, the wait times to get assessments done — they are really very challenging and they’re a challenge that parents are facing and services are facing every day of the week.

So I think anything that can creatively — and really in a very forward thinking sense, which is why I’m so interested in Frankl, in that it’s trying to address the issue in a very future directed way. It’s not just thinking about current options — it’s taking the future potential of what the blockchain can do and what technology in the space can do and it’s saying, ‘There’s a better future ahead, we just have to work out how to implement it and how we get there’. So I’m very eager to follow how this goes and I can see the positive result for families and services if it’s a success in the future.

“Frankl was written up in a way that tried to address the challenge in a way I hadn’t previously seen.”

ELISE: Did you have any questions about the whitepaper?

CRAIG: One of the things I was wondering was how you were going to access existing tests because I know that’s quite a restriction at the moment — they’re expensive and they’re owned by a very small set of publishers. So what were your ideas in terms of being able to offer cognitive assessments that parents will be really comfortable in thinking, ‘This gives quality outcomes’ and that services would think were valuable?

ELISE: So there are a few answers and I know that Jon will have more to say about this. But first of all yes! We will reach out and seek to work as much as possible with the people who publish existing tests.

That being said, we also see a big need for the development of new tests which can fill gaps around existing ones. Whether it be to flag kids who might need follow up with a clinician. Or whether it be that after receiving a diagnosis they need further cognitive tests carried out — for example, to have a look at their intellectual strengths and weaknesses and develop an education plan from that. So the approach is twofold.

CRAIG: I think that’s a good answer. The other thing that I was wondering about was the ease of purchase of the Frankl currency for families. I’ve bought cryptocurrency in the past and found it to be a tricky process to do it well. I was wondering about what you saw as being an accessible way to achieve that?

ELISE: There are a couple of different approaches to that as well. One is that we’re actually working closely with people who are trying to make the on-ramp, off-ramp process easier for cryptocurrencies in general. So if I’m making the transition from fiat currency — dollars, euros for example — into cryptocurrency, it will be much smoother, much more straightforward. And that will happen very soon.

The second option is to develop interfaces where participants can exchange dollars and we can deal with the rest at the start of the project. And the third is that we are going to set up some very short tutorials on some basic things like, ‘This is how you set up a digital wallet.’ ‘This is how you have to look at tokens.’ ‘This is how you transfer tokens.’ ‘This is where you should go to make sure you’re going to keep your token safe’ — and go through all of those things step by step.

So we’ll have that community support there but we’ll also very much look at trying to make it so that people who aren’t familiar with crypto don’t really have to think about it.

CRAIG: Brilliant. I think the idea of the Frankl currency and the transactions there make a lot of sense. And what the whitepaper was explaining about the cost saving in terms of working with multiple currencies around the world — there’s lots of benefits to using your own currency. It’s just such a new way of thinking about things and like you said, the on-ramp, off-ramp stuff for some people is still a barrier. So when that becomes more accessible it’ll be very exciting and there’s going to be a lot of potential that opens up in all sorts of spaces.

“[Frankl} is trying to address the issue in a very future directed way. It’s not just thinking about current options — it’s taking the future potential of what the blockchain can do and what technology in the space can do and it’s saying, ‘There’s a better future ahead, we just have to work out how to implement it and how we get there’.”

CRAIG: Is the plan to expand beyond cognitive assessments into other health and medical assessments and services as well? So say a parent gets a cognitive assessment for their child and they go through the process of getting Frankl and making microtransactions — is the plan that there is a bigger suite of things that those parents can further access so it’s not just a single transaction for them?

ELISE: Absolutely. So you understand this is Jon’s area of expertise — cognitive assessment and autism. So it’s a great place to start and it’s a good test case to make sure everything works the way we hope it will. But as soon as we have that infrastructure set up, it will be immediately applicable to a lot of other use cases. And everybody we talk to is coming to us with new ideas for use cases that we hadn’t even thought of. So we can say that once that basic infrastructure is built, it can be applied to different areas of medicine [and science, education, business as well].

We’ve also had people saying it would be fantastic to have a good history of [medical] records and somehow be able to share that with different clinicians. We’re not exactly sure how that might work with what we’re doing. But we’re definitely exploring possibilities beyond cognitive assessment. We want to think about all avenues quite early on to make sure that we develop in the right direction.

CRAIG: Absolutely, it’s something that I had explored myself a couple of years ago when eHealth was starting to come into the space. And I was just over at a hospital this morning and they’re still struggling with a lot of the eHealth systems in terms of sharing patient data and getting it into the right people’s hands and knowing the right processes to do that.

I’ve often thought that in a transdisciplinary space where you’ve got occupational therapists, psycholoists, speech therapists — a lot of these therapy teams that are funded through the NDIS — they are all working with children and they’re working with them in very different ways and they’ve all got their own information and their own assessments and their own data. But very rarely does that ever cross-pollinate. Very rarely my speech therapist will be able to benefit from the work that an occupational therapist has done. And maybe the family doesn’t know about that cross-pollination of information to better know their child.

So it’s interesting to think [Frankl] could be a one-stop shop to get your cognitive assessments and your different diagnostic tools used and you could have therapists who are linking to the system who could then add their data and get other data. And you’ve just got this big receiving and sharing of information on the blockchain and everyone’s benefiting from that — it’s got a lot of reach and potential and that’s why i think it’s so interesting to just see how that’s going to grow in the future — I think it’s just great.

Got questions?

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