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Interactive Therapeutic Multi-Sensory Environment for Cerebral Palsy Users

We present the foundations of the ITSE (Interactive Therapeutic Sensory Environment) research project that offers new opportunities on stimulation, interaction and interactive creation for people with moderate and severe mental and physical disabilities (e.g. people with cerebral palsy). Mainly based on computer vision techniques, the ITSE project allows the gathering of users' gestures and their transformation into images, sounds and vibrations. It can be used as a standalone application in individual sessions or, as an accessible musical instrument for music therapy sessions. The project was born in the Cerebral Palsy Centre of Tarragona (Spain) motivated by the low rate of users able to interact with computers. Although several assistive technology gadgets (e.g. key-guards, joysticks, switches, mouse emulators, etc.) and special software applications (e.g. cause-effect and educational activities, simple navigation environments, etc.) were used, most users "simply" didn't understand the interaction mechanisms. We believed that a high interactive activity (reinforced with sounds and images closely related with the gestures) would be more accessible to most users in spite of their sensory, motor and cognitive impairments. Currently we are working in a first prototype that is capable to generate sounds based on the user's motion and digitally process the user's vocal sound adding effects such as echo or reverberation. Tests with impaired users show that ITSE promotes participation, engagement and play. In this paper we explain the experimental methodology, the tools used and developed, the users’ profiles and the first results and conclusions. Future goals include testing and developing the most appropriate machine vision interaction techniques, sound and image generation engines and, also to develop and apply an analysis methodology to show and improve the effectiveness of the system.