Autism Labs

Revolutionary Autism Resources for Parents: Dr. Karnik's POD Health App

• Autism Labs Community • Season 4 • Episode 23

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Dr. Dilip Karnik, a pioneering pediatric neurologist with over four decades of experience, joined Autism Labs to introduce POD Health, a free, AI-powered digital platform designed to revolutionize autism care for families worldwide. Standing for Parent of Determination, POD Health centralizes medical, therapy, and educational records into a single smartphone app, making it easier for parents to coordinate care and access trusted resources. The platform features Open Mind Search, an AI engine that delivers evidence-based answers from thousands of scientific papers, and Piper, a virtual assistant that guides parents through daily challenges, retrieves medical data, and provides empathetic support during crises. Future innovations include genetic testing to personalize medication plans and wearable technology that monitors heart rate, anxiety, and seizure activity to predict meltdowns before they occur. Together, these tools bring precision, accessibility, and hope to autism care—empowering families to make informed, proactive decisions wherever they are in the world.

Mike Carr (00:04):

Well welcome everyone to another episode of Autism Labs and this week we have a really special guest. We've talked a lot about technology over the last few months and often it's coming, right? It's not quite there, but Dr. Karnik has actually established one of the largest, if not the largest pediatric neurology practices in central Texas. So he's an md, he's got tremendous experience in this space and he's developed an app to really help parents and a lot of other folks when it comes to managing autism, helping therapists understand what's going on with their kiddos, working with teachers and professionals and everyone else. So here's someone that's sort of pioneering and out ahead of everyone else in this field. And so I want to turn it over to Dr. Karnik right now and let him talk a little bit about his vision and what he is doing with health. So Dr. Karnik, take it away.

Dr. Dilip Karnik (00:56):

Thank you so much for giving this opportunity for me to be with you and your many folks that are following your great, great vision. Just to give you a little idea, I'm practicing as a child neurologist in Austin, Texas for almost 46 years now. I'm the first child neurologist began. I came from New York City in a small town of Austin and now it's a huge town for sure, and at that time I had to see almost everyone, but for the past almost 30 years, I'm concentrating my practice in cognitive neurology, which is a very, very specialized branch that includes autism and some of the relative condition. As a result, I see literally thousands of patients with autism in central Texas. I also have patients from all over Texas and many other states and I provide clinical care. That's what I do and therefore I have seen literally a hundred thousand plus patients over 46 years and that gave me such experience and knowledge what parents need.

(02:01):

And I've seen that many times. When you give a diagnosis such as ADHD or autism or epilepsy or learning disability, many parents dream gets shattered and they should not because now with the proper management, we can help autism patients to a great extent. I have many patients who had significant autism when they were young and they're almost near normal today. They have finished college, they have jobs and all that. So a lot of things can be done, but what I've seen is these parents don't get enough help after the diagnosis. They don't know where to go. Who are the doctors who are expert in that field? Who are the therapists, who are good and who are the well-known therapists or where they can get evaluations and all that. So literally they have to depend upon their primary care physician or a consultant and many times they do not get help.

(02:54):

Therefore, we started almost three years ago an app and we call that a pod app or pod health app. A POD stands for parent of determination and I've seen that many of the parents, especially those who have autism, they are determined for one thing, I am going to make my child very well close to normal and they will go after everything that is available and that I have seen is a very important factor for an improvement. And so we decided that we should have a name that is as cool as my parents and we decided to have our health or parent of determination. That's what it stands. So what does art help do? Art help will do whole lot of things for them and they can for example, get their chart on their iPhone and we will have Android copies so they can have entire chart of a patient on their phone and they can use that anywhere.

(03:55):

They go to different state, different cities, different countries. They have whole information with them. This chart will have their history, physical notes from their consultants, psychology notes, the lab notes, reports from MRI scan, EEG, and you name it. Everything will be stored in very orderly fashion as if they have the whole chart they're carrying everywhere and that is what we have done. And so they don't have to carry big binders, which we did 30, 40 years ago I used to have here and bringing all the binders. We are changing it to digital technology. So these an ap, we do it.

Mike Carr (04:33):

Yeah. One of the things I think so cool about what you're talking about is this idea because we've had the same problem. Our son's 35 years old and my wife's got binders of notes over the years and all the different therapists and practitioners. To have a single app where you have all of this that's available at your fingertips would just have been a game changer for us for decades. So the fact that you're doing this right now is super exciting and I hope every parent who hasn't gone down this journey we have understands how much easier it's going to make to track everything. So keep on going.

Dr. Dilip Karnik (05:05):

And so our goal also was to make sure that not only we do that, but give everything free for parents. So it costs them literally zero. And we have put about million dollar in designing and developing this app. So it was a very easy, it's a very complex app, but we want to make sure that every parent can utilize it and they have no cost at all. Now, in addition to chart, I also realized that they need to know list of people who are great in their community. We'll have them. They need to know who are the professionals where they can get therapies for speech, OT or cognitive therapies or a therapies and who are the great or better centers than the other. We'll have them on this app so they can do evaluations, they can approach pediatricians who have interest in this area. They can have neurologists that have interest in this area.

(05:59):

So we are helping them from a very many points. So it's not just the chart. The whole spectrum will be shown to them. They can download reports, any report literally, they can also communicate to different offices. They can drag information from a chart. For example, we use electronic medical system, Athena, and if they're Athena patient, they can actually get all information from the chart and upload on this app so that they don't have to do it. If they don't have that, then they can use a photo. They can just photograph every chart. It'll go inside the chart. So it is going to be extremely convenient for them, but that's not what we are going to just stop. We decided that there are a lot of other things that need, and one of the cool thing that we are doing, what we call open mind search, so this is a search engine that we are putting it together and that search engine is going to be first of a kind in United States and probably all over the world.

(07:02):

So with AI technology and there are a lot of AI technologies and a lot of things that are available now. We use that technology. We have literally experts from all over the country from Austin of course we have here. Then we have people from Massachusetts, we have people from New Delhi, from India, Bangalore, which is a Silicon Valley of India. And so we have experts from different countries came together on this platform and help us to have search engine. The beauty of this search engine is parents can find out any information on any condition, just type what they want, and within about 32nd to one minute that holds search engine, give them entire idea of what has been published. They get scientific literature, almost 10,000 plus papers. They go through and they summarize the data and they will give you what is that condition, how it is managed and how it can be done. All this thing is done together and this is for the first time it's happening and I think it's exciting. In fact, just two days ago I presented that to neurologists and their answer was, we want it now. Can I have it tomorrow?

Mike Carr (08:14):

Yeah. One of the things I think so cool about what you're seeing because we've been playing with some of the AI stuff that you're talking about, is the fact that it's an unstructured search. It's this idea that you load all this data through pod health into a database and parents don't necessarily have to know ahead of time how to phrase their question or what the question might even be. You can just sort of talk to this or as you said, key in the request and your AI is smart enough to go out there and parse all the data, find the relevant articles, find the relevant answers, and then provide that summary or recap For someone that's never experienced this, it's like a light bulb going on, right? Instead of having to fill out a form and follow some rigid structure, it's just like, well, I have this question about my son or daughter. They're behaving this way or I'm concerned about this, or I need a new therapist. Let me just ask Piper part of the pod health ecosystem what I need to do. And then you guys come back and serve up the answer that on demand freeform whenever I need it because all accessible through your phone to me is just huge. So I'm as excited if not more excited about this than you are.

Dr. Dilip Karnik (09:18):

The other beauty of this is we are giving it to not just parent or just physician, anybody, therapist, psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, pediatrician, neurologists, anyone who wants to know it'll be available and we are going to go total free for this service. I think that is the exciting thing and we are going to be doing it all over the world. So it's not only in the United States, but we are going to do everywhere. The whole idea of pod health, it's to help people from every corner of this world and that is one of the great things that we will be doing it. And the other thing that we'll be doing for parent is a piper. I think the Piper whole concept is absolutely fantastic for them. This is something that we needed for so many years and many parents talked to, they said this is exactly what they wanted.

(10:12):

So what Piper will do, Piper will be virtual assistant to parents. They can talk to Piper and say, Hey Piper, I need my MRI scan report done last month. Piper will just get it out for them. Or I need blood work report that was done two years ago from my chart. Well, Piper is there. Piper will actually find out all the information that we are trying to connect our deep search and hey Piper, find me how you manage absence seizures or complex partial seizure within half an hour, within half a minute or one minute, Piper will give them the whole information right in front of them. That service I think is a priceless service with nothing. Zero.

Mike Carr (10:56):

I agree. Lemme ask you a question. This is a little bit off script and you guys may not be there right yet, but I've gotten emails in the last few weeks from parents in different parts of the country. They're almost in crisis mode. Usually it's a single mom and she's got at least one profoundly, severely autistic kiddo at home, typically teenager, a little bit older, and she's at her wit's end. The school has kicked her out or there's problems with the school not providing the services that are needed. She doesn't understand what therapists might be available. Will Piper at some point provide sort of answers to those questions that parents are almost in crisis and they need an immediate response? I can think of one, a couple parents actually from South Florida in Dade County that were having a lot of problems and they didn't know that the school actually had a parent hotline that they could call or they didn't know that disability rights was sort of that advocate organization. How far into the weeds do you see Piper going to help parents in those situations or is that down the road aways?

Dr. Dilip Karnik (11:51):

Yeah, I think it'll be available in coming year because I'm working on that very aspect with few people and our idea is give parent the entire information. I mean, if they need legal help, I mean they can connect with the right kind of people and all that. So Piper, eventually we'll be their person to go virtual assistant to go for almost all needs. And we are building this, we just started two years ago. The whole thing is growing up and literally in last three months or so, we are doing so many things. So we started like this, just like any other startup company goes slowly and now we are going really up and I think next year and year after next will be a great growth for this company. The other thing that we are working on through this, which I think is very exciting, is testing.

(12:45):

See, as you know, many children with autism needs treatment. They're on medication in addition to therapy and all that. They also need medications and they need a whole lot of help. And we in the past were doing trial and error and we still do that to some degree. That means you put them on certain medications. If they have anxiety, put them on Prozac or Zoloft or something and that doesn't work, then put them on second one that doesn't work, put them on another one and see which one works. And that's what we have done. So now we have something called precision medicine so we can do genome testing on them and find out what medication is going to be safer or good for them. And this is what is done, and I do it routinely in my clinical practice, so as many psychiatrists and many neurologists, but I realized that the test we have in this country thus far, they will find metabolism of liver and liver, as you probably know, liver destroy or detoxify our body from different medications and it metabolizes it.

(13:52):

So we are either normal rapid metabolizer or we are ultra rapid so that liver clears it very fast and therefore medication become ineffective or it's a slow metabolizer. So the routine dose of medication can become toxic and you have side effects that we can find out whether the medicine is going to work on a metabolic basis. But I always wondered that that was not enough for me as a clinician. I would know that the medicine is safe. For example, I know Prozac is safe or Zoloft is safe for that patient because metabolism is okay, but I still don't know whether that medication is going to be effective on brain and produce desired reserves. So with our research team, we found out how liver is going to metabolize and if that patient has marker, that will show me that the brain will respond to it. Now I know and medicine is safe and effective and we are already doing this in India right now and we are doing tests. It's doing very well. We will be bringing that in this country I think in about four to six months. We are still working on some logistic, but that will be a game changer and it'll be extremely useful for clinicians like me who sees so many patients.

Mike Carr (15:09):

I mean every parent that we know and over the years we met a lot of parents with autistic kiddos. It is a guessing game, right? It's like our son has seizures. Well, okay, what cocktail of seizure meds is really going to be effective? Right now he's on four different medications and another parent may have aggressive behavior. And so what medications do you want to put him on to eliminate the guessing through genes and genetics and understanding, well, based upon the research that you guys are doing, this is going to be effective and it's not guessing anymore. And the other thing that's so exciting about what you're doing is the more parents that start using pod health and accessing it through Piper, the better your data's going to be, I'm assuming, right? So that over time you're going to have not just thousands, but tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands of parents and that case history.

(15:55):

And so the recommendations that POD Health's going to be able to make are only going to grow in terms of the quality of the recommendation, how it's tailored to your particular son or daughter. We've all heard the quote. I think that if you've seen one person with autism, you've seen one person with autism, now you guys can ferret that out and find, well maybe there are five other people really close to your son or daughter. One of 'em from New Delhi, one of 'em is in India or one of 'em is in South Africa. A couple of 'em are in the US. And having that data in your research really is I think what you said, a game changer. So I don't want to interrupt your flow here, but I wanted to insert some excitement from a parent's perspective.

Dr. Dilip Karnik (16:31):

No, I think just to do this whole thing is very exciting for us and that's why we are doing it. I mean, all parents, all parents who are involved in this country, they have similar child or child with some kind of disability and therefore they're not just knowledgeable, but they also have heart in it. And we want to make sure that we do it for parents who is our ultimate goal and now another thing we are doing, which I think is very exciting and just telling all this thing gives me so much excitement. So I'm working with a big company right now to design a wearable, people use wearable watch. I have Apple Watch and all that, and many people do have different kind of watch Fitbit or Apple and all that. So I was thinking that we have a technology at this time that is available.

(17:25):

There is a research has been done and is going on, but that technology is not applied for children with autism or epilepsy or ADHD and all that. So how can we do that? That was the whole idea. And of course when you have smart people around you, you can make things happen. So we approached a really big well-known company and I have a meeting, I had meeting with them and I have a couple of meetings and we are working with them because so far as a clinician I realized that our follow ups were subjective. When child has a seizure, for example, you ask child, Hey, I mean mom, how is your child doing? And say, okay, my child is doing well, seizure under control. If you have child with autism, then you ask parent, how is the child doing? Oh yeah, yeah, he's behaving better, he's less aggressive or he's in a happier and all that.

(18:18):

But these are all subject to think they're not objective. So I was thinking about how we can make that object and of course the research is out there. So we decided to put all this thing together and of course we have such a big scientist with us, it was kind of easy. And so we put that together and we are monitoring their heart rate, oxygen saturation, their activity level, their rhythmic activity, non rhythmic activity, the anxiety, the depression, all these factors. I have about seven or eight factors that I'm analyzing it. And we talked to this company and interestingly, the medical director has a child with neurological condition and I didn't know that, but he said, oh my God, we will make this as a priority, so it's going to be a priority. So what we are trying to do, and that is exciting, is somebody has a seizure middle of night, parents don't know if child is going to have a seizure.

(19:18):

I had patients who died middle of night. So now we have a watch that they can put and that watch is connected to the software that we have developed and developing. And that software will take that, watch all the input, put it together, and if it did not write based upon the principles we're using, it'll send signal to mom, dad or whoever and wake them up middle of night, say, Hey, there is a problem. We can see autistic children who get anxious for different reasons. We can find that out even before they're going to get anxious or meltdowns. So we can use some technology or technique to calm them down. We can find out ADHD children based upon their activity. We can monitor their activity in three, four hours a day. And that will give parent direct idea that your child was way active before. And with medication the child is taking now he's doing much better. Now that is a objectivity. So we are taking all the subjectivity into objectivity in future, and I think those things are going to game changing for pediatric neurology, child psychiatry and what we are dealing with for parent, it's something priceless. And we are going to that available.

Mike Carr (20:31):

We have our J13 nonprofits, so we've got anywhere from half a dozen to maybe 15 folks on site to have that wrist wearable on their wrist. So if someone is starting to freak out and the colleagues don't notice it, right? But now all of a sudden pod health sends an alert to a smartphone of the colleague that's sort of watching the guys, Hey, someone's fixing to have a meltdown, right? Their heart rate's elevated, their O2 saturation's down, which maybe means they're breathing at a more shallow rate, the breathing sped up, whatever those biometric markers might be. And so they can intervene before there is that down or before there is that seizure. That's huge. And then of course our vision, we want an app to where it's not just biometrics, but it's integrating audio and video. So think about some of the glasses that are coming out now that have cameras and audio recordings so you can actually see what they're seeing, hear what they're hearing throughout the day.

(21:24):

And then with AI, AI can go through a day or a week and parse out, okay, here were 15 incidents throughout the week where that particular child or adult had elevated heart rate and other indicators of stress. Was those good things? Were those joyous events, they were just having a lot of fun or was that something that was really setting them off? And then let's back up the audio and the video and let the team see what they were seeing and hear what they were hearing and identify what the antecedent was to the behavior or what the precursor was to the seizure and learn from that. Once we can take the biometric data and then integrate in the multimodal video and the audio, then not only is it a game changer, it's like a whole new way of living. So where you guys are taking this is unbelievable, really.

Dr. Dilip Karnik (22:08):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean using this variable technology eventually where children can take it into class and the whole lecture will be transcribed, and we are doing that transcription already for medical reasons and I'm going to take that into academic. So those were disabilities like dyslexia or dysgraphia or anything. The whole AI will give them a precise note, break it down into the way they can understand and they can hear. And of course Piper will teach them if they have missed anything, we are going to get going for them. So the way I see odd health future is many areas helping children with disabilities, and that's our goal. Help parents to support them, help child or children to get all that. And we are excited to put all this thing together. This is just the beginning of something that we feel is going to be a big huge one in future. So from 10 year onward, this will be a big thing. I'll also introduce my colleague and partner Nicole. She's helping us with Piper helping us with many, many areas and she's one of the fun person to work with. So Nicole,

Mike Carr (23:27):

I have a question for you too. I mean, everyone that's going to watch this is going to want to know how do I sign up? Where do I go? Are you guys ready? I mean, so at some point please answer those questions.

Nicole Osibodu (23:39):

Yes,

Dr. Dilip Karnik (23:39):

I'll let Nicole answer that because she's going to be one of the person who will be doing it. My job is medical job. I'm a neurologist. I take care of children and idea how we can use in such a way that we can help children and prn.

Nicole Osibodu (23:52):

Absolutely. So first of all, thank you for having us and I want to jump back to one of the things that you had just said about the multimodality within being able to add that audio and video with the wearables. One of the features that we have that's very exciting in Piper is called the Lifelog because we know that the real life or the holistic picture happens between those doctor's appointments. And so to be able to capture something in amazing that's happening or maybe the meltdown mayhem right in audio or video and even to go back and edit it and add more context and then have AI Piper as the AI personal assistant in your life that understands all those neurodiverse components of life and shows up with empathy and compassion and even that sense of calm when you were saying when there's a crisis, she will be the first line of defense before the doctor calls back, before maybe the parent can get in touch with somebody else.

(24:43):

So to be able to capture all of that information, disseminate it down using all the other things that you've uploaded from both the medical side and the education side, because Piper is a health and education concierge powered by AI is just amazing to be able to provide that to the parents. And so right now how other people can get involved is we have a small VIP beta program with parents just like yourself and parents of Neurodiverse kids and adolescents that can join and give us their feedback, what works, what doesn't work, what's missing, what else is here that they want to see or what is irrelevant. And even down to where is something in the app that helps you in that moment? Do you need it in the front or is it okay to have it be a few clicks away? So if they want to join that, they can just shoot me an email@nicoleathealth.AI and we'll get you into that program. And that's a very white glove communication program. So it's texting directly with the Piper team. And that's just invaluable feedback that we truly are building something that parents can use that's relevant there when they need it, and then something also that they want to share out and share with their friends so that it can scale and grow.

Mike Carr (25:48):

The thing that going back Dr. Carne to something you said, and Nicole, I know you shared this same enthusiasm, there's one platform that is the most ubiquitous around the world that even in third world countries where the household incomes a couple thousand dollars a year and they're living in what we would view at extreme poverty, but they have a smartphone. They have a smartphone, and the fact that this is going to be free. And so you talk about lack of access to quality medical care in almost every country in the world except for the US and a few other really top tier countries, this is arguably going to start to address that problem. It's free. It doesn't cost any money. If you've got a smartphone, you can access pod health, you can use Piper, you can have this wealth of information available to you. Maybe you don't have locally all the clinicians and all the therapists and all the medical, but at least you're getting some level of help and some guidance. So that universality of access at no cost is something that we've all got to feel really good about, right?

Dr. Dilip Karnik (26:47):

And that is very true and that's why one up my goal was to make it available to anyone. They should not be only for those who can pay for it and pay for service. I want to keep it for everyone and not just in United States all over the world. You're going to already have it on iPhones.

Nicole Osibodu (27:04):

I think this is a good kickoff almost to what's coming a lot of science that a press release with that genetic test that just came out that we could maybe make a little bit more relevant for your audience and maybe circle back with one of the genetic scientists that could be cool as a follow-up so that people can really understand the depth that the science goes and how that shows up in their lives to not have to have so much trial and error and to have the doctors know when they prescribe it, this is going to work or this will likely work is just that is a game changer as well. I

Dr. Dilip Karnik (27:33):

Think that's a good point. This is the initial introduction for this one, and there are a lot of things we are designing and developing that. I didn't want to go into all that until we have started, but my vision is this will be a complete program for parents where children with disability, having meeting with some of her scientists would be a good thing. Maybe one day I would like to come back and have my team as a team to talk about genome testing because we are unique when it comes down to genome testing. It's not been done at this time. So that will be a very big thing coming up, variables that we are doing. Once we have few meetings with the company, I would like to bring the whole thing about what we are doing and I'll get them involved. And the medical director who is apparently CTO, is very much behind this. So we can have a meeting to let your parents know what's coming up in future. I think it's very exciting. And there are a couple of other things in pipeline that I'm working on. That's all I do nowadays think and put things together. It gives me busy, but it's exciting. It gives me pleasure to do for children, and that's my mission work at this time, and we will achieve that.

Mike Carr (28:56):

Well, thank you guys so much for being on this episode of Autism Labs. I think this is the most exciting thing we have ever talked about, and we'd love to have you come back in a few months and talk to us about the progress and some of the new developments and more about your vision. So Nicole, thank you very much Dr. Karnik. Thank you very much for sharing such an exciting product and dream and vision for where you're taking the world to really living a joyful, fulfilled life, not just for the folks that have autism, but for the parents, the siblings that are freaking out about what's going to happen while mom and dad can't handle this anymore. And just the spirit of hope and optimism that if you have a kiddo with autism, there is help out there. There's no reason to give up, there's no reason to despair, and this is free. So it's not like money is going to get in the way. So thank you again so much.

Dr. Dilip Karnik (29:42):

Thank you. We are honored to be on your program and thank you very much.