Short report on research trends during the COVID-19 pandemic and use of telehealth interventions and remote brain research in children with autism spectrum disorder.

The authors report only 6 children, and they call the improvements preliminary and not yet published, so the paper cannot show treatment effects. The paper does not describe how children were assigned to creative movement or seated play, how dropouts were handled, whether assessors were blinded, or what the primary outcome was. The satisfaction scores come from children and parents in the same intervention context, and the paper does not report how they were analyzed or whether they were compared with face-to-face care. Parent reports of more communication at mealtimes or more social initiation are observations, not measured speech or language outcomes. The report says live actions may produce greater cortical activation than video, but it does not complete the comparison of telehealth and face-to-face effects. The neuroimaging part summarizes past studies and future plans, not new imaging results from this trial. Background numbers, such as 74% service loss and 93.7-99% satisfaction, come from cited surveys, not from the authors' 6-child pilot.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest. They state that the NIH funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The pilot trial is NIH-funded.

Do not read the 4.4 and 4.3 satisfaction scores or the preliminary motor improvements as evidence that the movement activities alone work. The trial is ongoing, the paper reports no completed outcome analysis, and the children also received parent prompting, reinforcement, modeling, redirection, and manual assistance, so the contribution of any single component cannot be separated.