Empowering caregivers in multisensory smart spaces for education and therapy

Interactive Smart Spaces (ISSs) are physical installations equipped with digitally enriched embedded devices that can sense the users’ presence and actions and generate stimulation for multiple senses. Our research focuses on ISSs for education and rehabilitation. In these domains, there is a strong need of tuning and controlling the User Experience to address the specific needs of each user or user group, a process that, in principle, should be performed by caregivers and in real-time. Nowadays, several examples of ISSs exist but they do not provide control interfaces that are powerful for customization purposes yet simple enough for caregivers, who typically have a limited technological know-how.