An ABC whose A can be counted.

Three places the record holds the context

• Typed setting events. Background conditions are recorded as tokens across five classes — physiological, sensory and environmental, social and relational, routine and temporal, emotional — beside typed physical rule-outs. Tokens can be counted; a sentence about a noisy morning cannot.
• A context key on the episode. Each episode carries its first setting token as a ctx_key, and the empty value is itself meaningful: a recorded “nothing unusual” is information, not absence.
• The carer’s own words, kept. The free-text description of what came before is preserved beside the tokens rather than replaced by them. Typing is for counting; the sentence is for the human who reads it next.

The reason this matters is visible in the history of the field. A formal functional analysis (Iwata and colleagues, 1982/1994) works by varying the antecedent condition — attention, demand, alone, play — and watching what the behaviour does. A record whose antecedent limb is prose cannot do the equivalent work from ordinary life, because the conditions it would need to compare were never made comparable.

The three body clocks, and what a band is

Three clocks run continuously from the person’s own recorded numbers — night_wakings, days_since_last_movement, refusal_day_count — and annotate every episode when it is read. They exist because the most common background loader of behaviour in this population is a body state that nobody thought to write down beside the behaviour.

A band is a declared reading convention on those numbers: three or more nights of broken sleep; three to four days without a bowel movement, then five or more; two or more days of refused intake. Three things follow from calling it a convention:

• It is not a clinical threshold. It does not say the person is ill; it says the record has crossed a line the team declared worth reading differently.
• It is annotation joined at read, never part of the key an episode is filed under. Change the convention and no history is rewritten — the underlying numbers and episodes are untouched.
• It is the person’s own scale. The clocks count their nights and their days, not a population average with their name on it.

The differentiation law: the record decides, not the taxonomy

Two people can share a diagnosis, a function and a behaviour and still be loaded by completely different things. So WellDash does not assign loaders from a category system. Which background state loads which behavioural form — whether a shut bowel shows up as tapping while broken sleep shows up as hitting out — is established from that person’s own co-occurrence, and the same function under a different band and a different form is treated as a different piece of evidence rather than averaged into one.

The distal and proximate layers — the slow background versus the thing that happened a minute before — are recorded for honesty, because clinicians reason with them. They are deliberately not load-bearing: nothing downstream depends on a call the record cannot make reliably.

Flag, never force

Every typed vocabulary faces the same moment: a carer describes something real for which there is no token. There are three possible responses, and two of them destroy the record. Squeeze it into the nearest wrong token and the counts become fiction. Drop it into prose and the observation leaves the countable world. WellDash takes the third: the gap is flagged, so the vocabulary can grow with evidence behind the growth.

A flagged gap is a feature of an honest ontology, not a defect. It is also the only mechanism by which a typed grammar can survive contact with real lives rather than gradually teaching staff to lie in dropdowns.

What this puts in front of a practitioner or a panel

• Setting-event, antecedent and rule-out frequencies for the period — what actually kept turning up before the hard moments, counted rather than recalled.
• Each incident with its run-up: the sequence of phases that preceded it, so escalation is visible as a shape rather than a single bad hour.
• The body clocks beside the behaviour record, which is how “he was unsettled all week” turns into “he was on day five without a bowel movement all week”.
• The log book itself over any date range, incident-first when that is what the reader needs.

The typed antecedent pieces would add the last piece — any “episodes preceded by X” question answered as a count rather than a search through notes. That is the designed step, and it is named as direction above rather than claimed here.

Questions, answered the way we answer them

The rest of the grammar

• Body first — what the mortality reviews demanded of the record, and the override that answers them.
• The fade — support recorded so it can plan its own exit.
• The four pillars — the whole grammar in one place.