Introduction

Autism is usually diagnosed by conventional methods at about 3 years of age. Asperger’s syndrome is a lighter form of autism in which language is present and intellect is unimpaired. It is therefore much more difficult to diagnose before age 6, when it is noticed that such children have difficulty making friends. A few years ago, we showed that all such autistic children have movement disturbances that can be detected by our methods in infants as early as 6 months of age. We use Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation (EWMN) — an Israeli-developed movement analysis system that allows us to detect these movement disturbances in videos of these infants taken long before it was realized that they would become autistic. Since autism runs in families, we intend to study infant siblings of known autistics to see whether we can predict from their movements whether or not they will turn out to be autistic (or Asperger’s).