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An Ehealth web platform based on linear-programming models for scheduling intervention plans for children with developmental delays

Abstract:

According to UNICEF, 93 million children 14 years old and younger in the World present moderate or severe developmental delays or disabilities. Several studies point out that the time between pregnancy and six years are crucial for the children’s development. In Latin America, it is common that teachers and early childhood educators must work with groups of 30 or more children, having not enough time for planning strategies for intervention on children with Special Educational Needs (SEN). For these reasons, in this paper, we present an eHealth web platform to design four-weeks intervention plans for children with SEN automatically. The platform contains a mathematical kernel based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and considers six areas of cognitive development of children between two and five years. To test the platform, we worked with 29 experts with a broad experience working with children, and the results obtained confirm that it is necessary to have these kinds of tools to improve the early stimulation process on children with SEN.