Applied Health Technology & Research
Caetano & Laborda develops health and assistive technologies that help neurodivergent people, families and professionals communicate, coordinate support and understand progress across real life.
Why we exist
Care happens across clinics, homes, schools, workplaces and ordinary routines. Most software serves only one of those settings well.
The result is repeated forms, lost context, and people having to explain themselves again and again. For autistic people and their families, that fragmentation becomes a barrier in its own right — to communication, to healthcare, and to participation.
The market is feature-rich and continuity-poor. There are capable products for clinical administration, outcome measurement, AAC, routines, education and family–professional collaboration. Far fewer give the person meaningful control over the information that has to travel between them.
That gap is our subject. We are not building another all-in-one autism app. We are building the consented continuity layer for neurodivergent care.
Our audience is not only parents. We build for autistic people, families, and the professionals who support them — including late-diagnosed adults, people moving from paediatric to adult services, and AAC users who have aged out of child-oriented systems.
The continuum
Continuity is not a feature. It is the relationship between four places where care either holds together or falls apart.
The person's own voice — including when that voice is augmented. Authorship stays with the communicator.
Preparing for, taking part in and understanding a clinical encounter, with accommodations that actually arrive.
The working relationship with clinicians and support workers, and the record that makes it coherent over time.
Everything between appointments — school, work, administration, routines, and the coordination burden families carry.
The commitment
Making information travel is the easy half. Making it travel only when the person chooses is the part that decides whether a system respects the people inside it.
The profile belongs to the person it describes. Supporters and professionals receive only the permissions they are granted, for a stated purpose.
Permissions are granular and can be withdrawn. Access is auditable, and no professional can silently widen their own view.
A supporter's need to help does not create an automatic right to read private communication. Support areas are for coordinating care, not observing a person.
Open, documented exports. A person can leave without losing their profile or their vocabulary. Essential communication must not expire with a subscription.
Software may suggest; only the person communicates. Nothing is spoken, shared or decided on someone's behalf. Validated instruments stay deterministic, and generated output is always marked as generated.
Programmes
Every programme carries its real maturity. We distinguish what is built from what is prototyped, and promising ideas from validated outcomes.
Supports the professional relationship.
Telehealth and clinical workflow for mental-health professionals: sessions, validated assessments, documentation and outcome tracking. Instrument scoring is deterministic, and sensitive responses require human acknowledgement.
Does not diagnose. Clinical decisions stay with the professional.
Carries accommodations, communication preferences and outcomes.
A person-owned profile describing how someone communicates, what accommodations they need, and which outcomes matter to them — shared by expiring link, QR, or print, in sections they choose, and revocable at any time.
The passport concept exists elsewhere. The workflow around it mostly does not.
Protects and enables the person's voice.
Offline-first AAC, Brazilian-Portuguese first. Built for the full range of communication — refusal, consent, pain, self-advocacy, privacy, humour — not only requests, and designed to travel from childhood into adult life without losing vocabulary.
A communication tool. Not therapy, not treatment.
Reduces administrative fragmentation.
Navigation for the paperwork surrounding diagnosis, care and support: referrals, deadlines, eligibility, waiting lists and school or university accommodations — with a clear owner for every next action.
Being tested as a human-verified concierge workflow before any platform is built.
A consumer-health experiment.
Held deliberately apart from the care portfolio. It may later contribute daily-health or energy-management infrastructure, but it does not form part of the continuity thesis today.
Kept distinct so the care narrative stays honest.
Research & method
Our current product directions are evidence-informed hypotheses. They are drawn from published research, service literature and autism-community organisations — and they are not yet validated in our own studies.
Adult and post-diagnostic support is underserved; healthcare encounters remain inaccessible; families carry the coordination burden; outcome measurement skews toward symptoms rather than quality of life, autonomy and participation.
Where information is actually lost, what people must repeatedly explain, which accommodations are requested but never delivered, and when an AI suggestion feels helpful rather than intrusive.
Paid, accessible research with autistic adults, AAC users, families and professionals — asynchronous and AAC-supported options, multiple sessions, and a supporter present when the participant chooses.
Not downloads or screen time. Time to prepare for an appointment, whether accommodations arrived, repeated explanations avoided, breadth of communication functions, and progress on outcomes the person chose.
On co-design. Participatory research is frequently claimed and rarely resourced. We intend to establish a paid autistic and AAC-user advisory role in product governance — and we will not describe our work as co-designed until that process genuinely exists and is compensated.
The group
Caetano & Laborda holds the research thesis, the care model and the consent architecture. The operating companies build and run it.
Portugal · European Union
Engineering and operations for the European context — Portuguese and Spanish language support, EU healthcare pathways, and the needs of Portuguese-speaking families across Europe.
Wisconsin · United States
Engineering and operations for the United States, and the entity through which US clinical and institutional collaborations run.
Governance and legal details. PLACEHOLDER — add registered entity names, company registration numbers, registered addresses and formation dates before launch. Left blank deliberately: nothing on this site is invented.
Safety, privacy & AI
Some capabilities are technically available and we decline them, because they trade a person's autonomy for someone else's convenience.
We do not build diagnostic AI, facial emotion recognition, meltdown prediction, autonomous crisis advice, caregiver surveillance dashboards, or products that optimise for compliance, eye contact or masking. An AAC system never speaks a predicted message without the communicator confirming it. Health, therapy and communication data are not used to train external models by default.
Where a function could drive diagnosis or treatment, regulatory assessment happens before release, not after.
On compliance language. Our systems are designed around GDPR principles, with readiness and independent assessment in progress. We do not claim certification, and we will not describe ourselves as compliant before that has been independently assessed.
Contact
We are interested in clinical pilots, research collaboration, and conversations with autistic-led organisations — and we welcome autistic adults, AAC users, families and professionals who want to take part in our research. One address reaches us for all of it.