Blue home

A project for families with autistic children and teens.

A new way to help and be helped, totally immersive and with a great impact.

A large house with cameras and headsets, where everything is carefully controlled, you can use it in many ways. The best known is the "Big Brother" mode: you put ten more or less famous characters in it in search of visibility, you broadcast them 24 hours a day on live TV and wait to see what happens, building around us a bit of chatter anyway. A much less known, but infinitely useful, way is the one experimented in Varese by the Holy Family Foundation in a structure with four independent apartments suitable for hosting as many families. To be precise, families with autistic children and teens. In practice, dad, mom and children (including brothers and sisters of autistic children) move to this new apartment for ten days, as if it were a vacation.

Here, through hidden cameras, microphones and earphones, everyone is constantly followed by a highly specialized team, with the aim of improving the quality of daily life and correcting any maladaptive behavior. In short, a precious help in defining a real education program. The initiative, unique in Europe, is called the "Blue Home" project (blue is the symbolic color of autism) and so far in its experimental phase it has hosted two families. With the official start, the experience can now also be extended to other families who had booked in recent months: at least twenty.

In detail, the homes are equipped with home automation systems and are furnished with particular auti-sm-friendly features, so as to make them as functional as possible. Each apartment is monitored remotely by a psycho-logo and an educator: after the first day dedicated to welcome and dialogue, parents and children are observed for 2-3 days, during the day, through an audio control circuit. video, without any intervention by the operators. The following days are carried out activities guided by specialists, to correct any errors and suggest alternative strategies. The seventh day is dedicated to mutual rest, while in the last three days the operators limit themselves to observing the behavior of the family to verify the improvements.

There is also a logbook, which is used by parents to record the particular moments of each day, which are then evaluated by the foundation's experts in order to highlight the "critical" moments and teach the family the most correct behaviors to adopt. A new way to help and be helped, totally immersive and with a great impact, to improve the life of your family together.

Stefano Caredda

NP Agosto-Settembre 2021