Emerging information technologies across the autism service and prevention continuum: a narrative review of screening, diagnosis, intervention, and health equity.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a major global public-health concern, yet timely identification and support remain difficult to access for many families, especially in rural, low-resource, and otherwise underserved settings. Emerging information technologies have been proposed as tools for narrowing this service gap. These include artificial intelligence (AI), wearable sensors, and the Internet of Things, mobile health applications and digital therapeutics, telehealth, immersive virtual and augmented reality, social robotics, and large language models. This narrative review organizes the evidence across an autism service and prevention continuum: upstream risk awareness and health education, early screening and diagnosis, and intervention, management, and long-term support. We use this continuum strictly as a public-health service-organization framework, not to imply preventing the birth or existence of autistic individuals, consistent with a neurodiversity-affirming perspective. Across each stage, we apply a health-equity lens centered on reach, affordability, scalability, health-system integration, and equity of performance. We summarize current applications, appraise recurring limitations, and synthesize cross-cutting issues of equity, data governance, ethics, neurodiversity, and implementation. Recurring limitations include small and heterogeneous studies, dataset bias, weak external validation, short follow-up, and uneven regulatory maturity. Emerging information technologies show genuine promise as complements to conventional autism services, particularly where specialist resources are scarce. Realizing population-level benefit will require equity-centered design, validation in diverse and low-resource settings, larger and longer trials, interoperable standards, and meaningful involvement of autistic people and their families.