An Intelligent Mobile Application to Support Daily Care Coordination and Behavioral Insight for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder using Visual Scheduling and AI-powered Analytics

Abstract

Families raising children with autism face intense, around-the-clock caregiving demands, yet studies show most caregivers lack coordinated support and experience significant financial and emotional strain as a result. This paper presents Bright Care Path, a mobile application built with Flutter and Firebase that centralizes daily routines, behavioral logging, medication tracking, and provider communication into a single account-scoped tool. An AI layer, powered through a secured Cloud Function calling OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini, compares recent data against the prior period to surface trends caregivers might otherwise miss. Key challenges included designing a caregiver-first interface, choosing a cost-efficient but reliable AI model, and protecting sensitive child data through authentication-scoped storage. Two experiments tested the AI's reliability: one found its statistical accuracy depends almost entirely on how much calculation the surrounding code performs beforehand, and the other found the AI substantially outperforms a simple offline fallback at classifying caregiver behavior notes. These findings show that thoughtful engineering around an AI model matters as much as the model itself, making Bright Care Path a meaningfully more dependable tool for the families who need it.