The findings suggest there may be a range of benefits in using telehealth with individuals with ASD, their families, and teachers. Further research, however, is required particularly regarding the use of telehealth directly with children with ASD for assessment and intervention.

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Introduction Telehealth can be an effective way to provide speech pathology intervention to children with speech and language impairments. However, the provision of reliable and feasible standardised language assessments via telehealth to establish children's needs for intervention and to monitor progress has not yet been well established. Further, there is limited information about children's reactions to telehealth. This study aimed to examine the reliability and feasibility of conducting standardised language assessment with school-aged children with known or suspected language impairment via a telehealth application using consumer grade computer equipment within a public school setting. Method Twenty-three children (aged 8-12 years) participated. Each child was assessed using a standardised language assessment comprising six subtests. Two subtests were administered by a speech pathologist face-to-face (local clinician) and four subtests were administered via telehealth. All subtests were completed within a single visit to the clinic service, with a break between the face to face and telehealth sessions. The face-to-face clinician completed behaviour observation checklists in the telehealth and face to face conditions and provided feedback on the audio and video quality of the application from the child's point of view. Parent feedback about their child's experience was elicited via survey. Results There was strong inter-rater reliability in the telehealth and face-to-face conditions (correlation coefficients ranged from r = 0.96-1.0 across the subtests) and good agreement on all measures. Similar levels of attention, distractibility and anxiety were observed in the two conditions. Clinicians rated only one session of 23 as having poor audio quality and no sessions were rated as having poor visual quality. Parent and child reactions to the use of telehealth were largely positive and supportive of using telehealth to assess rural children. Discussion The findings support the use of telehealth in the language assessment of school-aged children using a web application and commercially available computer equipment. This reliable and innovative service delivery model has the potential to be used by speech pathologists to provide assessments to children in remote communities.

Introduction Access to cognitive assessments for children living remotely is limited. Telehealth represents a potential cost- and time-effective solution. A pilot study was conducted to determine the feasibility of telehealth to assess cognitive function in children with learning difficulties. Methods Thirty-three children (median age = 9 years 11 months), recruited from the New South Wales (NSW) Centre for Effective Reading, underwent assessment of intellectual ability. Comparisons were made between the intellectual ability index scores obtained by a psychologist sitting face-to-face with the children and another psychologist via telehealth using a web-based platform, Coviu. Results The telehealth administration method yielded comparable results to the face-to-face method. Correlation analyses showed high associations between the testing methodologies on the intellectual ability indices (correlation coefficient range = 0.981-0.997). Discussion Findings indicate that telehealth may be an alternative to face-to-face cognitive assessment. Future work in a broader range of cognitive tests and wider range of clinical populations is warranted.