We’re creating an online platform where autistic people, family members and carers can share how sensory processing affects their daily lives. We'll use this information to make environments such as schools, workplaces and leisure facilities more accessible for autistic people, and to educate the public.

Autistic people often experience differences in the way they process sensory information, such as sound and light. This can have a big impact on many autistic people’s day-to-day lives. We’re working with The Alan Turing Institute and the autism community to create the largest-ever collection of these experiences.

Explaining the need for The Project

In 2016, we asked over 1,000 autistic people, relatives and carers for their top research questions. Understanding sensory processing was one of their top priorities.

Sensory processing differences mean some environments can be overwhelming for some autistic people, so they avoid them. This could prevent someone from visiting essential services like the doctors, or missing out on social opportunities.

To help understand the effects of sensory processing better and remove some of these barriers, we need to collect more information from a large number of people. We aim to build an online platform where people can enter their experiences of navigating the world, which we will collect as a large set of data.

The research process

This is a participatory research project. This means that people from the autistic community will be involved not just as research volunteers, but as decision-makers, and researchers. We set up a 'steering group' who help shape the project.

This is also a citizen science project: non-professional scientists help directly with the research by providing their information and feedback.

The platform is being built as 'open source'. This means that all the code we create to build the platform can be freely changed, shared, and built on by anyone, without charge. This will encourage more great citizen science projects in the future. The project is open to volunteers from anywhere in the world through our repository on GitHub: an online space where anyone can help us create and improve code for the platform.

Many autistic people feel that research happens without them. This project empowers autistic people as co-creators. Autistic people will be involved at every stage; setting the direction of the project, shaping it and contributing as authors in the final research papers.

We will work with organisations and policy makers to improve the challenging environments identified in the project. This will change environments to suit autistic people's needs and preferences and help educate people about autistic people's experiences.