A Comparison of the Use of Telehealth in Autism Intervention Before and Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic: Motivation, Areas of Research, Limitations

Laurie Furtado

Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic that began in March 2020 changed all means of engagement, and from that point on, virtual meetings became one of the only ways to maintain some sense of normalcy. For some industries, telehealth was a completely new technology, but in the field of Applied Behavior Analysis for autism intervention, the use of telehealth as a method of service delivery has been researched for the past decade. The way that telehealth was used in research over the past decade, however, differs from the way that telehealth is being used in light of the pandemic. The studies reviewed in this comparison all involve researching the effectiveness and/ or fidelity of using telehealth for applied behavior analysis. In each study, telehealth was used to train parents in a variety of ABA strategies, allowing parents of children with autism to provide quality intervention to their child. Each study took place between December 2015 and January 2020, which is prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, these studies provided evidence that parents of children with autism can be trained with high levels of fidelity to implement specific elements of ABA. Nevertheless, throughout the pandemic, telehealth has been used by professionals to provide services directly to the children, with the parent there to help facilitate but not deliver the intervention to the child themselves. Future research will need to be done in order to determine both the effectiveness and fidelity of delivering intervention services through telehealth instead of delivering parent training over telehealth.