What is a Sensory Room?

Sensory rooms are a space designed to help an individual with sensory processing difficulties receive the stimulation they need and learn how to regulate their sensory requirements. These rooms are a great place to help calm children down prior to an OT session, learn how to regulate different inputs and also serve as a safe place to introduce new sensory experiences.

Sensory rooms can also be a great way to integrate play and therapy for our younger patients! This helps keep them engaged in their session and makes it fun!

Sensory rooms can have a wide variety of equipment, tools, and technology here are some of our favourite pieces of equipment in our Sensory Room:

Pod Play Equipment

You may recognize this tool as something you might see at a local park, but what you may not know is that this equipment is a great way to exercise their proprioception sense and learn a variety of tasks.

Proprioception is the awareness of the body and movement of the body. Heavy work or tasks that involve resistance and input to muscles and joints is imperative to regulating proprioception. Running, jumping, sliding and crawling through this equipment is an excellent way to help with this and help with coordination and strength.

Complex equipment such as this is great for learning problem solving skills, coordination, words such as over/under/up/through and following complex instructions.

Omi Projector

Integrating technology to achieve better clinical outcomes is a key ambition at Concentric. The Omi Projector is one the most advanced pieces of technology in our Sensory rooms.

The Omi Projector is completely customizable and can be adjusted to suit a person’s needs, abilities and interests to maintain engagement and practice important skills. On the wall, images and games are displayed. Then the patient can use their arms, legs, jump or run to move things on the screen. Gamification of therapy can be a great way to increase engagement during an OT session, calm active patients before going to table based activities, and can also be used to increase flexible thinking and problem solving.

Nest Swing

The nest swing also has few different functions in our sensory rooms! One of our favourite instances is to increase body awareness and vestibular input. Vestibular input is the sense of knowing which way up our body is, knowing we are moving forward or backward or if we are spinning.

Nest swings can also be used as a calming tool using steady back and forth movements lying or sitting on the swing. It can be used when lying on your back with balls/bean bags scattered around on the floor with the person stretching out to reach these and throw them into a hoop. It can be used to move someone in all different directions for vestibular input to regulate someone’s sensory needs before completing table top activities.

More information:
If you think a sensory room would be helpful or if you have any questions please contact us on 1300 148 160 or email support@concentric.com.au.