Magic Room: A Smart Space for Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorder

Abstract

We exploit recent advances in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) technology to create the "Magic Room", a smart space created for use by children with Neurodevelopmental Disorder (NDD) and their caregivers. The Magic Room has been designed in cooperation with NDD specialists and supports multimodal embodied interaction by providing controllable stimuli to the vestibular, proprioceptive, and tactile sensory systems through various smart devices, e.g., ambient projections, physical objects, toys, ambient and mobile lights, aromas, and soap bubbles. We have deployed the Magic Room at two therapeutic centers. We performed exploratory studies with eight caregivers and nineteen children with severe impairments in the NDD spectrum, who used the smart room across four months with encouraging results. Our work may pave the ground for new research in the arena of CPSs for subjects with NDD and inspire new interventions for this target group.

Interactive Multisensory Environments for Primary School Children

“…The Magic Room presented in this paper is the latest version of the iMSE reported in [1] and [13], and results from a long technology re-engineering process and a countless number of design refinements and extensions. The first version was mainly intended for relaxation and free play of persons with NDD.…”

Analysing trade-offs in frameworks for the design of smart environments

“…IoT technologies have largely accelerated this trend till the point that many environments we live in are today augmented through an interleaving between the cyber and the physical worlds (Conti et al 2012). This new technological landscape opens up the space for the creation of disruptive SIEs (Ardito et al 2017a;Delprino et al 2018;Garzotto and Gelsomini 2018;Marshall et al 2016;Petrelli and Lechner 2014;Zancanaro et al 2015). This is having an unprecedented impact on the activities that can take place in environments provided with capabilities of "augmented sensing and interaction" (Cook et al 2009).…”

“…Such capabilities generate Smart Interactive Experiences (SIEspronounced see-ehs), i.e., usage situations, enabled by IoT systems, where the final users can determine, through their interaction, a "personalized" behaviour of the overall system. SIEs are now adopted in different fields: education (Andreoli et al 2017;Madeira et al 2011;Uskov and Sekar 2015), art exhibitions (Cuomo et al 2017) and museums (Marshall et al 2016), therapies for intellectual disabilities (Garzotto and Gelsomini 2018) to name but a few.…”

Paper Prototyping Comfortable VR Play for Diverse Sensory Needs

“…We begin an exploration tailored to the individual's sensory stimuli thresholds and sensory regulation needs by situating in the context of leisure interests. Our goal is to ensure each participant is comfortable in terms of levels of tolerating the environmental stimulation and having the degrees of control over the sensory aspects of the environment, as seen in [3], before we consider how next to support social interactions and learning opportunities.…”

“…Inclusive play spaces are needed to accommodate the range of sensory needs. Therefore, in this work, we engage with a neurodiverse group of children to ensure a future system appeals to, is usable by, and is comfortable for children from multiple perspectives [3,9]. In particular, we co-designed leisure activities for three children described by their families as either neurotypical, autistic, or ADHD.…”