Hi, I'm Anika Kale, a high school student with a growing interest in neuroscience, neurodevelopment, and how technology can be used to better support people in healthcare.

When people think about growing up with a younger sibling, they usually picture a certain kind of chaos: fighting over the front seat, stealing each other's stuff, blaming each other when something breaks, arguing over who got the bigger piece, and insisting that everything is somehow more unfair for the older sibling. But somewhere between all the arguing, there are also the inside jokes, shared memories, getting into trouble together, and all the little but significant moments that come with growing up.

Growing up with my younger brother has always looked a little different.

My brother is on the autism spectrum, so I learned pretty early that connecting with him didn't always happen in the ways I expected. Playing together could look different. Communication sometimes took more patience, and figuring out what he needed often meant noticing things he couldn't easily explain himself. Over time, I became much more aware of the small details in his environment and routine that could completely change how he was feeling.

Behavioral therapy eventually became a common part of our routine. Since I was 10, I watched different therapists work with my brother while documenting his behaviors in a huge binder through standard logs. As I got older, I started helping during his sessions too, which gave me a much closer look at how those systems worked.

I started noticing that the logs were great for recording what happened, but not always why it might have happened.

They could document a behavior, when it started, how long it lasted, and what happened after. But there were so many smaller details that could get lost: a change in his routine, something overwhelming in the environment, a sensory trigger, or a pattern that didn't seem important until it repeatedly occurred.

I kept thinking about how useful it would be if all of those details could exist in one place. Instead of only looking back at individual events, what if families and therapists could track the context around them too? What if they could actually notice patterns over time and use them to better understand the person behind the data?

Those questions became the starting point of AutiNote.

I created AutiNote because I wanted to create and explore a different way of tracking neurodivergent experiences; one that would go beyond simply documenting behaviors and make room for common patterns, environments, triggers, and everyday details surrounding them. What started as something I noticed while sitting in on my brother’s therapy sessions eventually became a project where I could bring together my experiences with him, my interest in neuroscience, and my love for creating things that solve real problems.