IEEE ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY MAGAZINE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2005 19

early diagnosis, treatment, and care.Several university partners haveexpressed their deep interest in partner-ing with us on the research and devel-opment issues of such a project. Wefeel that the same technologies willalso be relevant to research in broaderpopulations, including attention deficitdisorder, language disorders, Alz-heimer’s treatment and research, andmany more areas.

S.S. Demir: Lots of the readers will beinterested in hearing about relatedcareer and/or investment opportunities.Would you please summarize the careerand/or job opportunities?

R. Oberleitner: We are a small busi-ness, currently being modestly fundedby multiple sources. We have submit-ted proposals for a number of externalgrants from both the federal and privatesectors; they are currently beingreviewed. As our growth continues, weanticipate creation of a wide range ofmultidisciplinary opportunities. The jobopenings will include biomedical engi-neers, computer scientists, and infor-

mation technologists. We believe thatthere will be many challenging andfinancially and emotionally rewardingcareer paths carvedout for the profession-al staff tackling spe-cial-needs disabilities.

We invite sociallyminded investors andlarge company collab-orators who see this asan opportunity to helpleverage their re-sources to providethese bioengineeringservices quickly anddramatically. We’veintentionally kept theTalkAutism servicesas a branded entitywith potential intellec-tual property opportu-nities. Philosophically,we believe in indus-try’s role to acceleratethe availability ofthese bioengineeringservices to support families, universities,and governments.

S.S. Demir: Please let us know ofthe Web site from where our readerscan get further information about

your company.

R. Oberleitner: Ourcurrent communica-tion services can beviewed by going towww.talkautism.org,where nearly 1,000families and profes-sionals use TalkAutism each day.Bioengineers andcompanies interestedin sponsoring col-laborative researchactivities, or want-ing to be apprised ofthe progress of bio-engineering princi-ples applied toautism, may alsowant to go towww.autismtechnol-ogy.org. Readers

should feel free to contact me direct-ly at admin@talkautism.org.

Autistic people’s decisions oncomputer programs may be“biomedical data,” definingtheir behaviors.

BME Company Profiles (continued from page 15)

How the Autism Community Shares

Knowledge, Information, and Assistance

For more information about TalkAutism™ services: Please visit www.talkautism.org Email: admin@talkautism.org Phone 888-355-7161

TalkAutism™ is a trademark of e-Merge Medical Technologies

Boise, ID © 2004-5

MEDICINEAND BIOLOGYIEEE ENGINEERING IN

Magazine

VOLUME 24 • NUMBER 1 ■ http://EMB-Magazine.bme.uconn.edu ■ JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2005

Technology toImprove Autism pg. 14

14

talking to the autism community

Semahat S. Demir

IEEE ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY MAGAZINE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2005

BME Company Profiles

In this column I am featuring e-Merge Medical Technologies andspecifically its TalkAutism serviceby presenting an electronic interview

I recently had with Ron Oberleitner, e-Merge’s president.

S.S. Demir: We were honestly sur-prised to see TalkAutism exhibited atour recent annual meeting. Would youplease introduce TalkAutism to usand let us know the connection to bio-engineering?

R. Oberleitner: Historically, e-Mergehas been successful in introducingemerging technologies to the medicalmarketplace in fields of telemedicine,advanced diagnostics, and Internet ser-vices. In 2001, due to my own personalinvolvement with autism and knowingthe unfortunate rise in new diagnosedcases, we redirected much of e-Merge’sresources to introduce and now manage atechnology-based service calledTalkAutism, a branded communicationservice for this rapidly growing special-needs population. People with autismhave a broad spectrum of deficits in com-munication and social skill abilities andof detrimental behaviors, and yet theyrespond well to intervention if diagnosedand worked with at an early age.TalkAutism has rapidly become a nation-al “watering hole” for the autism commu-nity, providing online threadeddiscussion boards, distance learning,informational resources, and identifica-tion of specialists in all fields of educa-tion, therapy, and medicine. It’s availableto the public directly at www.talka-utism.org and through embedded serviceswithin other autism organizations’ websites. With an identifiable network nowcreated, we are now focused on develop-ing a telehealth service and data manage-ment platform to help familiescommunicate health and behavioral

issues remotely, while providing betterhealth and educational data to accelerateresearch. Upon interactions with biomed-ical engineering world leaders like Prof.Swamy Laxminarayan, we attended therecent Engineering in Medicine andBiology Society (EMBS) Conference inSan Francisco to both present a paper onthis telemedicine platform and, at thesame time, communicate our deep con-

viction that the bioengineering commu-nity has a critical role to play in helpingthe world to understand and addressmedical mysteries like autism and otherbroader neurological disorders. We wantto tap into the EMBS braintrust onbehalf of our autism community andchildren. The EMBS conference in SanFrancisco was a great opportunity topresent autism issues and problems to alarge audience of pioneers in biomedicalengineering. Their most valuable inputshave significantly contributed to ourunderstanding of newer technology per-spectives in autism research, early inter-vention, and treatment.

S.S. Demir: Why is bioengineering soimportant to the treatment or researchof autism?

R. Oberleitner: Children with trou-bling neurological disabilities likeautism struggle to communicate theirfeelings or intentions to their parentsand others in the world around them.Families struggle through crisis aftercrisis dealing with tantrums, sleepless-ness, obsessions, and nonspecificbehaviors. Health and educational pro-fessionals are making progress in help-ing these children. We now have theopportunity to tap into the expertise ofthe bioengineering community for anobjective, scientific interpretation ofthese behaviors and perhaps theirintended communication.

S.S. Demir: Where are your company’sefforts concentrated in bioengineeringand biosciences?

R. Oberleitner: On the one hand, weneeded to have an understanding ofwhat objective data acquisition wastechnically possible to help us reach outto existing autism clinicians andresearchers in the pursuit of alternativeresearch tools and approaches whichmight yield further results in the treat-ment of this disability. And at a practi-cal level, like countless other familiescommunicating their needs onTalkAutism’s communication services,families need more support from theirhomes to get help. This is wheretelemedicine can play a huge role. Forexample, we see a great potential bene-fit in transmitting secure video clip datafrom home as a means to communicateindescribable behaviors and self-injury.

Early on, we elicited the experiencesof Prof. Swamy Laxminarayan. His pastresearch in such medical conditions assudden infant death syndrome (SIDS),

Ron Oberleitner

IEEE ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY MAGAZINE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2005 15

epilepsy, sleep disorders, AIDS, andleprosy, helped convince us that bio-engineering and bioscience principlesare of paramount importance to theunderstanding of the disease state, aswell as to the impact of technology onthe detection, monitoring, and earlyintervention of the autism sufferers.

Biomedical engineering and biomed-ical information technologies will play amajor role in the future in addressingthese issues. What bioengineering didfor heart patients in the 1960s with pace-makers and advanced imaging in the1970s and 1980s with CTs and MRIs,we believe bioengineering can do forspecial-needs individuals—allowingmore objective communication of neu-rological disorders so that clinicians andresearchers have more data to workwith. We think bioengineering expertisecan support meaningful advancementwith autism this decade. Our company iscurrently very active in the developmentand implementation of various technolo-gies, and the TalkAutism forum cancomplement the effort by bringingneedy families together with the profes-sional community, which openlyembraces better means of communica-tion and richer data to work with.

S.S. Demir: Is there a market for suchtechnology and services?

R. Oberleitner: The United Statesalready pays an estimated US$90 billiona year for services and treatment for upto 1.5 million people diagnosed withautism in this country alone—mostunder the age of 13. Other countries arefacing similar incidences. In less than tenyears, the societal costs are expected torise to US$200–400 billion per year. Asan example, 15,000 public school dis-tricts currently pay up to US$60,000 perchild to bus children to out-of-districtspecial-education schools. The improvedcapture and communication of studentmedical and behavioral observations toremote experts could meaningfullyreduce the need to do this. Familiescould also better communicate with pro-fessionals. Thus, our services shouldkeep more students in local educational

settings and help families deal with agreater range of difficult behavioral andmedical events in the home. Importantly,researchers would be able to obtain farbetter data on this disability and haveaccess to a greater study population;stressed families and remote rural fami-lies are more likely to participate inbehavioral studies through telemedicine,reducing stressful travel. A huge marketexists for using biomedical technologieslike telehealth and information technolo-gy just for the current treatment and ser-vices available—and there’s an evenmore dramatic market and businessopportunity if such data can lead to moreeffective treatments and cures. Andbeyond this, a huge international marketlooms where there is even less access toexpertise on this important disability.

S.S. Demir: Would you please com-ment on your company’s partnerships,collaborations and alliances?

R. Oberleitner: We’ve developedstrategic alliances with universitieswho are interested in the TalkAutismenvironment as well as other tele-medicine initiatives we are develop-ing. E-Merge’s project managementexpertise in targeted grant programs isfocused on 1) autism—a recently iden-tified priority by NIH, 2) technologyapplications, and 3) rural healthcare andunderserved populations. Through pub-lications and a presence at internationalcongresses and special topic meetings,we have attracted a great deal of interestand collaborative support from bothindustry and academia. Upon requestfrom Prof. Laxminarayan, we haveinteracted in the development of a pro-posal to globalize autism researchefforts through the InternationalFederation for Medical and BiologicalEngineering. We are also developingpartnership initiatives with the EuropeanUnion countries. My wife and I alsofounded and now support a nonprofitorganization, Princeton AutismTechnology (www.autismtechnology.org), which dedicates itself to research-ing and applying technology solutions toassist the autism community.

S.S. Demir: Can you give us anoverview of the new areas that yourcompany will expand into in the nearfuture?

R. Oberleitner: Our long range goalsare focused on developing center-of-excellence-quality telehealth and infor-matics services. This will facilitate aunique informatics research environ-ment and the remote collection of abroad spectrum of pertinent data tosupport multiple worldwide initiatives,including NIH’s Autism PhenomeProject priority. Autism research cur-rently benefits from advances in speechprocessing, face processing, gaze pro-cessing, functional magnetic resonanceimaging, mathematical modeling of thebrain, genetic engineering, and othercognitive measures. Our services willprovide both the infrastructure and theintelligent tools for data mining andinterparameter correlations for effective

Eleven-year-old Robby Oberleitner—and up to 1.5 million others—are afflict-ed with autism in the United States. Itsincidence is believed to be compara-ble worldwide.

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