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This paper aims to identify the characteristics practitioners consider essential to effective multisensory rooms and the barriers they experience when trying to realise the potential of such rooms.

The paper presents semi-structured interviews with 27 multisensory room practitioners from a range of backgrounds followed by analysis to identify key characteristics and barriers.

Eleven positive room characteristics were identified. The three deemed most significant were that the rooms are dark, activity associated and uninterrupted spaces. Two negative room characteristics were identified: inaccessible design and broken equipment. Ten barriers to effective multisensory room practice were identified and grouped according to themes of logistics, suboptimal usage and practitioner capabilities.

The research focuses on a small self-selecting sample, coded by one person acting independently of any institution. This is an under researched area which would benefit from further more rigorous investigation.

This research enables practitioners to remove barriers to effective multisensory room practice and to focus on the characteristics most significant in generating benefits for room users. Understanding of the essential characteristics and potential barriers to effective practice will allow practitioners to better exploit limited resources of time, money and staffing.

Past research into multisensory rooms has focused on specific user groups or specific multisensory environments. This research examined multisensory room practice across both a range of environments and a range of users, giving an original overview of current multisensory room usage in the UK.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a commentary on Grace’s article on multisensory rooms.

This paper gives a historical overview of the emergence and evolution of multi-sensory environments (MSEs) together with an outline of a current research project seeking to support best practice.

MSEs have become a standard feature in special educational needs schools in the UK with government building guidelines now stipulating the inclusion of at least one sensory room within any such provision. However, there is little research-based evidence from which design decisions can be informed. Instead, previous research has tended to focus on the effectiveness of MSEs for specific user groups.

The outlined research will establish some initial design principles for MSEs.

Music education and music therapy offer many positive benefits for students with disabilities. This chapter highlights some of the most recent research in both fields and in neuroscience that offers strategies for special educators to use to increase inclusion in music classes and ensembles.

In this chapter, we overview different neuroenhancement techniques that could be applied for accelerating the learning process in a number of tasks that are associated with occupational roles. The techniques range from: (1) pharmaceutical and invasive methods with limited applicability to the healthy population, due to possible side effects and obtrusiveness; (2) game-based brain training that shows task-specific potential, but may not generalize; and (3) a promising new research direction in which the goal is to “train” the brain to reach an optimal cognitive state for performing a given task, and remain in this state by self-regulation. However, in order to accomplish this goal of brain training, the neurological markers that best discriminate good task performance need to be identified. We also review a number of initial studies in this chapter which have analyzed such markers in a variety of training-related applications for different occupations, such as military/security (e.g., marksmanship, deadly force judgment and decision making, submarine piloting and navigation, phishing detection), medicine (e.g., robot-assisted surgery), banking (e.g., financial traders), sports (e.g., golf, archery, and baseball), or entertainment (e.g., musicians and actors). The promising results of these early studies are fueling interest in neuroscience-based technology and methods in the rapidly developing field of organizational neuroscience (e.g., leadership research). We conclude the chapter with a discussion of future research directions.

This purpose of this paper is to seek service users' opinions in order to assist the development of the challenging behaviour strategy (CBS) being developed by Worcestershire Mental Health Partnership Trust.

Potential focus group members were identified by local advocacy workers and clinical psychologists. All were known through their involvement in advocacy groups. During the focus group, opinions were sought on the draft CBS document to establish areas to be modified. Focus group members also spontaneously highlighted helpful and unhelpful service responses to challenging behaviour, their opinions of the term “challenging behaviour” and ideas about how such behaviour may develop.

Service responses were seen as important moderators of challenging behaviour. The proposed strategy was seen as mostly acceptable, but there were some important caveats raised. Participants thought that individuals should be involved as much as is possible in services (e.g. recruitment, inspections of services). Participants also discussed ideas of how to achieve their desired service, which was flexible and inclusive with well‐trained staff who understood the reasons for the individual's distress and how best to help with the resulting behaviours.

Service users with behaviour described as “challenging” are able to reflect upon the service they have received and provide helpful feedback and suggestions on improving it. Service users want staff to understand each individual and the triggers to their behaviour, as opposed to treating people the same way.

This chapter examines the significance of multisensory experiences in the branding of the Swedish tourist destinations. Firstly, it provides a critical review of the relevant literature in the field of nation branding. It discusses about the tourism branding strategies that are intended to attract more visitors to Stockholm and in other areas in Sweden. Secondly, this contribution suggests that the destination marketers are engaging with tourists and are providing them with multisensory experiences to drive their emotional resonance for the Swedish destinations. Thirdly, it analyses how the ‘Swedishness’ could be expressed through the destinations’ attractions and from creative marketing campaigns. In conclusion the author provides four case studies on ‘The Swedish Number Campaign’, ‘ICEHOTEL’, ‘The ABBA Museum’ and ‘IKEA Museum’ to better explain how the Swedish destinations are providing the mentioned multisensory experiences to tourists.

This study aims to investigate the effect of customers’ multisensory service experience on customer satisfaction with cognitive effort and affective evaluations using big data and business intelligence techniques.

Online customer reviews for all New York City hotels were collected from Tripadvisor.com and analyzed through business intelligence and big data analytics techniques including data mining, text analytics, sentiment analysis and regression analysis.

The current study identifies the relationship between affective evaluations (i.e. positive affect and negative affect) and customer satisfaction. Research findings also find the negative effect of reviewer’s cognitive effort on satisfaction rating. More importantly, this study demonstrates the moderating role of multisensory experience as an innovative marketing tool on the relationship between affect/cognitive evaluation and customer satisfaction in the hospitality setting.

This study is the first study to explore the critical role of sensory marketing on hotel guest experience in the context of hotel customer experience and service innovation, based on big data and business intelligence techniques.

Drawing on virtual liminoid theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine factors that induce a multisensory flow experience in an e-shopping context through the use of augmented-reality interactive technology (ARIT).

To validate the research framework, a task-based laboratory study was performed. Participants were recruited through a snowball e-mail method and requested to freely and independently use ARIT for clothes fitting in the laboratory, after which they completed a questionnaire; 336 valid responses were received.

Empirical results revealed that three decorating psychological states (sense of body ownership, sense of ownership control, and self-explorative engagement) directly induced a multisensory flow experience. Furthermore, two multisensory factors (sense of self-location and haptic imagery) mediated the multisensory flow experience through these three decorating psychological states.

Consumers not only rely on generating self-display for optimal fitting in virtual avatar decoration in an e-shopping context but also concentrate more on expression and control of self-body. As consumers’ decorating psychological states require an ideal form of self-expression, a high degree of autonomy in exploring self-decoration options will create more value for consumers. Considering that expressing and controlling the self-body in addition to self-explorative engagement in virtual avatar decoration will trigger the flow experience in an e-shopping context, increasing the use of multisensory ARIT to trigger decorating psychological states in e-shopping contexts is highly recommended.

In this study, a relationship was constructed among virtual liminoid theory, flow theory, and multisensory technology, and an integrated conceptual framework was developed for the relationship between decorating psychological states and multisensory flow experience.

Multiple intelligence, cognitive thinking, and sensory theories provide the framework for understanding how to improve learning and learning environments for students. Research involving the use of a multimodal video game to enhance student learning is discussed. It is proposed in the chapter that multimodal and multiplayer video games make use of sensory-rich interactions to engage users, create meaningful experiences, and often facilitate communication between people located all over the world. Multiple learning theories are addressed and evaluated in order to bring to light issues and areas for investigation when designing technology-rich learning environments. Implications of the findings in relation to connections with gaming technologies, capacity for community building, and next steps for investigating ideal designs for 21st century learning environments are discussed.

This study bridges the gap between sensory marketing and the use of the internet of things (IoT) in upscale hotels. This paper aims to investigate how stimulating guests’ senses through IoT devices influenced their emotions, affective experiences, eudaimonism (well-being), and ultimately, guest behavior. The authors examined the potential moderating effects of gender.

Research conducted comprised an exploratory study, which consisted of interviews with hotel managers (Study 1) and an online confirmatory survey (n = 357) among hotel guests (Study 2).

The results showed that while the senses of smell, hearing and sight had an impact on guests’ emotions, the senses of touch, hearing and sight impacted guests’ affective experiences. The senses of smell and taste influenced guests’ eudaimonism. The sense of smell had a greater effect on eudaimonism and behavioral intentions among women compared to men.

This study concentrated on upscale hotels located in Europe. Further research may explore the generalizability of the findings (e.g. in other cultures, comparison between high-end and low-end hotels).

Managers of upscale hotels should apply congruent sensory stimuli from all five senses. Stimuli may be customized (“SoCoIoT” marketing). IoT in hotels may be useful in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, as voice commands help guests avoid touching surfaces.

IoT can be applied in creating customized multi-sensory hotel experiences. For example, hotels may offer unique and diverse ambiances in their rooms and suites to improve guest experiences.