Through an integrated mobile application developed under the "Connecting for Children with Autism" project, 300 children with autism from Bucharest, Ilfov and Suceava will be monitored in real time during the therapy and recovery process, which will facilitate their integration into the education system.

Developed over a period of one year, until June 2018, the project was launched by the Help Autism Association in partnership with the Association of Applied Behavioral Therapy - ATCA and the New Odyssey Association and is co-funded by the Vodafone Romania Foundation with approximately 320,000 through the Connecting for Good 2017 program. The total budget of the project is of nearly 600,000 lei.

The mobile solution will enable the permanent connection of the team members involved in the therapy and recovery of children, a team consisting of a physician, psychologist, social worker, parent and educator, in order to facilitate the continuous monitoring of the evolution of the children. Through the new system, the team will be able to access data of medical, social, therapeutic and educational interest at any time for an overview of the stage of the child's development. Monitoring through this mobile solution will thus allow for an intervention plan tailored to the needs of the children.

In the development of the program, which will integrate two software components, besides the team of programmers, four psychotherapists with experience in working with children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders will be involved. The 300 children, currently in the care of eight therapy centers belonging to the three associations, will be the first beneficiaries of the new solution. Also, 70 psychotherapists from these centers will use the mobile applications in the therapy process, thus replacing the use of paper records and shortening the time spent developing progress reports. At the end of the project, implementation of the solution will be extended countrywide.

The Vodafone Romania Foundation is a Romanian nongovernmental organization with charitable status, distinct and independent of the company's commercial operations, set up in 1998. In its 19 years of activity, the Vodafone Romania Foundation has funded 1,046 programs run by 660 NGOs throughout the country, in the fields of health, education, social services.