Magic Room: A Smart Space for Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorder

The Magic Room is a smart space for use by children with neurodevelopmental disorder (NDD) and their caregivers designed in cooperation with NDD specialists and currently deployed at two therapeutic centers in Italy. It supports multimodal embodied interaction by providing controllable stimuli to the vestibular, proprioceptive, and tactile sensory systems through ambient sound and visual projections, soap bubbles, aromas, lights, toys and other physical objects. Results of an exploratory study involving 8 caregivers and 19 children with severe NDD impairments who used the Magic Room for four months are encouraging and might pave the way for new research and inspire novel interventions in this area.