Faraag said they came up with AutiZmo while sharing ideas. “We were joking around and saying wouldn’t it be nice if there was a robot you could tell your problems to and find a solution and Cat said she could do that,” he told the Sunday Mail.

Demetriades had already invented a system that could run such scans, and the idea developed to put that ‘brain’ into an affordable robot that families with autistic children could acquire.

“We want it in homes. We don’t want it complicated… AutiZmo will be part of the family and we want him small enough so people can carry him,” said Demetriades.

The system it will run on is called SMART, which stands for ‘stored memory access retrieval technique’ and is based on DNA sequencing.

“I can chart and measure every emotional experience you’ve had in your life and the life stories that are encoded into your DNA, decode and deactivate them,” Demetriades said.